Aphex Twin fans and Tech Savy people - check this!

Link

He put his face IN THE SONG.

EDIT: Thank you for the correction!:)

Better link

And the pic...

Are there really old albums that had hidden messages when played backward? I remember a simpsons episode where they mentioned this beatles song had a food recipe when played backward, and during the credits at the end of the show they played it. I thought they just made it up and doctored the song. But is it true?

The Simpsons was a made-up example. The Beatles do have backwards messages in some songs.

One that comes to mind is on Prince's "Purple Rain"... I forget what song, maybe Darling Nikki, but you play it backwards and it goes on for quite a while saying "Hello, how are you? I'm find because I know the Lord is coming soon. Coming soon."

Which songs, do you know? And what kind of messages?

Some songs do deliberately have backwards messages in them, but when you hear them, they are obvious. There is an example on Pink Floyd's "The Wall", on an ELO album, and others. These are snippets of actual reversed tape. They sound like unintelligible backwards speech when you listen to them.

The idea that a normal lyric, when played backwards, will say something different, is simply a case of people hearing things they want to hear in random groups of syllables. For instance, there is the idea that you can hear backwards messages in "Stairway to Heaven". I've played with this myself, and when you hear the results, you can tell that any backwards messages were purely accidental. Yes, there's one bit where it seems like Plant says "here's to my sweet satan" (by reversing the line "there's still time to change the road you're on"), but it's totally random and accidental.

More details at this site:
http://fly.hiwaay.net/~crispen/rants/secrets.html

I don't recall off the top of my head. I know Sgt. Peppers and Abbey Road were the two albums with the most subliminal stuff.

Yeah, pretty cool stuff. My friend and I here at work were checkin out various songs a while ago, trying to find other imiges, but the only one we could find was that face in Windowlicker. We haven't gone through our entire Aphex Twin collection yet, but we just might...

Anyway, here is a link to the software we used if anybody is interested.

Cool. Good link.

I was just listening to Strawberry Fields Forever cause they mention it in that link Tony posted. There's a lot of faint talking at the end, but I couldn't really decipher any of it.

At the end of Dennis Leary's song Voices in My Head of his No Cure for Cancer CD, he has a deliberate message near the end of the song.

I reversed it a couple of years back but I cant remember what it said, it something rather stupid though

What I'd like to know is what software was used to produce the audio from the images. I've never heard of anything like it. Really cool though....

It is listed in the article... the audio actually sounds horrible - so not of much use except as experimental music.

Check the link I posted earlier in this thread.

It's software that does exactly that. I've used it, it works great. Also, I believe it is the exact same software that was used in the screenshots.

Duh...

Nevermind my last message.

I just realized you were talking about going FROM the image, TO the audio.

(yeah... get some rest...)

Anyway, me niether. No idea how he busted that out.

It is called "MetaSynth" Mac only...

http://www.uisoftware.com/PAGES/acceuil_meta.html

Sick...


*me wants Win32 version*

On the lighter side is Bloodhound Gang's 'Lift your head up high and blow your brains out'. It has an obvious reverse message, but when you play it back the message itself is pretty much nonsense too. Something like "The Devil shall wake up behind chef boyardee and eat 'roni". That's the best I can make out of it.

"Life is short and hard like a bodybuilding elf, so save the planet and kill yourself"

Love BHG lyrics.

-Zeke
-Zeke

"More conventional artists like Britney Spears would have some trouble hiding this."

Britney's hidden message is sex. You know what I'm thinking! Hmmmmm......... Selling porno to minors?

"I buried Paul....."

And Tony may be able to help me on this one...during an interlude on one of the songs on Rush's Moving Pictures album, there is a small part that sounds like muffled speech. It sounds like Geddy Lee but who knows, I always thought it was a mistake made during the recording session but as Rush are such perfectionists, this seems unlikely....

BTW I can't remember the name of the song but it dealt with the differences between two cities?

You're referring to the speech at the beginning of the song "The Camera Eye", which contrasts the different atmospheres you notice while walking down the streets of Manhattan and London. It's the opening song on side two (remember the album was made when we still used record players).

The speech is supposed to simply be voices amid the hustle and bustle of the city streets. It doesn't, as far as I know, contain any hidden messages. It's deliberately mixed so that you can't tell what's being said.

The next song on the album, "Witch Hunt" has a similar set of voices, this time supposedly sounding like an angry mob coming to burn a witch. It wouldn't surprise me if the voices on Camera Eye and Witch Hunt were pulled from the same recording session. Here is a description of the Witch Hunt session, taken from two separate interviews with members of the band:

From "Visions": "It is purposely mixed so that you cannot understand what is being said, but the tenor of the situation, the hatred, the ill will, and the fear comes through loud and clear. This effect was created by emptying the studio (in the middle of a snowy night) of production staff, road crew and band, and depositing everyone in the cold outside the isolated facility. With tape recorders rolling, Neil gave his best fanatic's speech, gradually getting more and more whipped up as everyone involved let themselves get carried away."

Alex Lifeson ("In The Studio" for Moving Pictures): "We went outside of Le Studio and it was so cold, it was really cold; we were well into December by then, I think. We were all out there. We put a couple of mics outside. We started ... rauw, raew, wrow ... (starts mumbling), ranting and raving. We did a couple of tracks of that. I think we had a bottle of Scotch or something with us to keep us warm. So as the contents of the bottle became less and less, the ranting and raving took on a different flavor and you got little lines of ... you remember Roger Ramjet, the cartoon Roger Ramjet? What was the bad guy's name ... his gang of hoods, they always had these little things they would say whenever they were mumbling ... mrrblaarrr ... mrrblaarrr ... crauss. It started to take all this ... we were in the control room after we had layed down about twelve tracks of mob - in hysterics. Every once in awhile you'd hear somebody say something really stupid."

Hey Tony

Actually no...I know the part you're talking about but this portion is in the middle of the song during some light guitar work...it is very hard to discern, when I first noticed it, it was back in '81 though my horrendously large 70's style headphones (remember those?)...years later when CD's became prevalent, it was much easier to hear...I will have to dust off a copy of that album and go searching for it so I can pinpoint the exact location for you. I really don't think it was intentionally placed in the song, it did sound like someone talked briefly in the background while recording was occurring...

Interesting. If you can give me a time index, I'd love it.

If you're referring to the voices around 8:56, that's the same kind of thing, this time it's English voices for the "London" part of the song. It's deliberate, just like the voices at the beginning. They make sure you can't understand what's being said by burying it in the mix.

Could be...

I haven't listened to the song for a long time so I'll have to refresh myself when I get home from work tonight...I do seem to remember it was three sounds, like "Hey, what's up"

I have hung onto the memory for so long because back then I was a HUGE, HUGE Rush fan. I knew all the lyrics to all of their songs up to that time. I saw the "Moving Pictures" concert at Maple Leaf Gardens in Toronto (was there a better place to see Rush?) that summer...so I was dumbfounded to hear a "mistake" in one of their songs...If it was intentional, then look at all the discussion it generated ha ha...

I'll get back to you with the time index soonest...

John

On a side note: My video teacher at Dearborn High School (Russ Gibb - he'll show up in any search) was the DJ who started a rumor that Paul was dead after an annoymous caller detailed all of the "clues".

Is it just me or is that Metasynth site hard to read?

just off the top of my head, i knew about the aphex twin song, i knwo there are a few songs, and one song that is accully done backwards, and you can play it forwards, and its a differnt song, but dosnt sound like its being played either way, aphex twin is a creative person, oter than that i know Incubus, Azwethinkweiz has a hidden message at the end, there are about a dozen more that i know of jsut cant think of them off the top of my head.

What about CDs with those sneaky tracks before track one? Those really creep me out and I can't figure out how to rip them. I believe the Willie Nelson tribute "Twisted Wille" has one, one of the albums by "Mono Puff" has one... and I think TMBG's "Factory Showroom" includes one as well. They only seem to work on audio-only players and you have to rewind from the start to hear them.

Details of how the pre-gap tracks work are here. In an earlier version of that FAQ, Factory Showroom was specifically mentioned, but he seems to have removed that note in favor of a link to http://www.turbine.com/oddcd/ .

There are lots of tricks you can pull with track indexing on audio CDs, some of them have been used as attempts at copy protection, even.

And while we're on the subject, Andy seems to have updated his CDR FAQ with some really interesting information regarding Audio CD copy protection schemes. Great stuff, check it out if you're interested in how CD copy protections work.

Digging up an old thread because I found an interesting piece of text regarding the "city sounds" and voices on the song The Camera Eye. As follows:

The song opens with street sounds taken from the 1978 Superman Movie. The sounds are taken from the scene where Clark Kent arrives at the Daily Planet for his first day of work. The sounds from the movie are edited to some degree but there is no doubth that this is where they came from. The synth intro begins overtop of these background of sounds. The street sounds then change to the sounds of typewriters/teletypers/etc. which is when Clark enters the Daily Planet offices. These sounds fade approximately 50 seconds into the
song.

Incidentally, this text was found at the Rush Tablature Project. I just contributed a transcription change to YYZ there.