gtaylor@lasspvax.UUCP (Greg Taylor) (03/26/85)
After I'd attended a relatively recent "the Truth about Rock" crusade at the local church, I got intrigued again with the notion of "backward masking" for a couple of reasons. First, I wanted to know if there was any hard perceptual research to back up the notion in the first place. Secondly, I used to fool around with it myself. Well, there ain't any research that I can find about the ability of people to be influenced liminally or subliminally by reverse language. There seems a body of research that suggests that without serious attention and training, most people can't even reverse a sequence of tones (attention twelve tone enthusiasts....), let alone decode speech. What little research there is suggests that some places get results by putting "forward masking" into a piece...nearly burying some phrase or set of verbal signals in a wash of pink or white noise. This has also been tried in department stores, and is done by playing messages about shoplifting at very low volume with the elevator music. The noise of the place itself acts to provide the masking effect. There does seem some research that suggests that a sequence of rhythms can be more easily reproduced than pitches, I believe. As to the backwards masking, I learned that in the language laboratory as an undergratuate. The initial inspiration came off an old Todd Rundgren album (forgot the title, it was a double.) Todd recorded the phrase "How about a little fanfare?" Forwards, reversed it, and then learned the reversed version. Then the recorded recitation (or as close as you can get) is recorded and reversed. The result is really useful for interesting Choral effects on a budget (I like it particularly for imitating Islamic or Southeast Asian vocal techniques, as I can't sing very well). ANyway, the language lab at my school has old halftrack open reels, so we all learned out craft there.