Have you ever heard music upside down? What do you think happens? In today's article we want to tell you about what, in the 1960s, became a fad.
In 1969, followers of the Beatles they had the strong conviction that one of their leaders, Paul McCartney, had died and this fact was being hidden from public opinion.
The proofs that supported that belief were the "mysterious messages" that were hidden in the lyrics of their songs when they were heard backwards.
In the song "Revolution 9" you hear the phrase "Excite me, dead man" in English when the audio is played back in reverse. That is one of the messages that made McCartney believe he was dead. But although all these statements have been categorically denied, we can still find videos on YouTube with songs of the Beatles played backwards. Have you heard any? If you do that, you will realize that these messages are there clearly, another thing is that they mean what they say they mean.
So, if we listen to those messages when we hear the music turned upside down, how can it be a deception? The answer is in our brain and in his intense love for language.
The music backwards beyond the Beatles
Although the fashion of listening to music backwards began with the Beatles, it soon took this "discovery" to other artists looking for messages in their songs. Led Zeppelin, Styx or even Queen were subjected to the "experiment".
In the decade of the 80's there really was a big boom with this kind of practices and a kind of public obsession was created to find hidden messages , and even satanic, in pop songs.
An example of this type of upside down music that is supposed to contain messages is the famous "Another One Bites the Dust" of Queen . We invite you to watch the next video played backwards. If you are not very familiar with what you are supposed to hear in this upside down music, you will surely not hear anything strange.
Queen fans believe that what is heard is "it's fun to smoke marijuana." Have you heard the video? Now that you know what the Queen fans think they understand by listening to the music backwards, do you hear the same thing? Are you able to detect it?
So, what happens when you listen to music upside down?
If these messages do not really exist as such, why do we listen to them so clearly? As we said, the answer is in our brain. It processes speech in a totally unique way "from top to bottom", this is the description given in a 2006 study. Speech is not only heard as sound, but the brain first of all classifies it in a special way. ; the speech protocol is activated, there is information in this noise! Then he uses some context and information keys that are familiar to him so he can decipher what he is saying.
If we take the Queen video as an example, we realize that when we discover what is supposed to be heard when the music is played backwards, your brain prepares to listen to all that previously unintelligible noise. The next time you've heard it, with all that new information, your brain is already able to interpret the noises in a totally new way and as a result, you hear the message loud and clear. Incredible true?
In 1981 an experiment was carried out in this field. A group of volunteers were asked to listen to "sine wave speech" sound clips and then describe what they had heard. Most volunteers in the experiment said they had heard things like "sounds of Science fiction "Or" animal cries ". It is important to say that this group was not given any prior information.
Another group in the experiment was told that they would listen to "a prayer produced by a computer" and were asked to transcribe that sentence as clearly as possible. Up to two thirds of the volunteers managed to write some correct words and a third successfully transcribed the entire sentence.
The last participating group was told exactly what prayer they were going to hear and they were only asked to affirm if they were able to hear and understand it. The vast majority said they heard it.
All this shows how our brain is connected to language. In our millions of years of evolution, our brain developed in a way that values the sound of speech over all other sounds, even over noises that could kill it such as the roar of a lion or the noise of a landslide. that could bury you in a matter of seconds.
Our brain, when put into "talk" mode, automatically seeks connections with language. That makes us even capable of "imagining" that we hear coherent sentences where they are not.
What do you think about music in reverse? Have you ever done the test? Expose us!