watson@uunet.uu.net (Steve Watson) (11/13/90)
I heard an article about alleged backwards masking on the CBC science program 'Quirks & Quarks' a few years ago. They interviewed someone (sorry, name forgotten) who'd researched the subject,and done some experiments. 1) They recorded some text and played it backwards to a group of volunteers. The subjects then answered a multiple choice questionaire about the content of what they had heard. The group scored no better than random on the test. Conclusion: IF some bands really are doing back-masking, it has NO INFLUENCE on the listener; our auditory systems just aren't geared to decoding a time-reversed message, subliminaly or otherwise. 2) They played backwards speech to a group of subjects, and asked if they heard anything that made sense. They didn't. Then they asked them to listen for a particular phrase (he did this on the radio, too: it really worked!), and played it again: sure enough, that 'phrase' (which was really just a random pattern of sounds) jumped out at them. Conclusion: The ear tries desperately to make sense of what we hear. If someone (say, a pastor with perhaps an overactive imagination) convinces himself that he is hearing a pattern in the nonsense of reversed speech, and then tell you to look for that pattern, YOU WILL HEAR IT TOO, even if ther is really nothing there. Considering what some of these bands say when played FORWARDS, you really wonder why they would bother anyways.... -- ====================== disclaimer =============================== "Blame me, not the Company I keep..." - Steve Watson UseNet: mitel!spock!watson@uunet.uu.net