—Creativity—
I have a new day job and they've been streaming music off the internet over our speakers. So we've been hearing some overplayed and popular rock songs that someone or some computer thinks we want to hear, or ought to hear. Today, on a lazy Sunday when I should be finishing my paintings, I got to thinking about one of these tunes from the early 70s. I Googled it and I found discussion about the supposed backwards message in the recorded lyrics.
So I watched a video that plays the music backwards and spells out the supposed Satanic lyrics. And I heard in the recording exactly what was printed in the video frame: 666 and Satan and such. I found this remarkable because, looking at the actual lyrics, I couldn't see how they would phonetically sound like 666 and Satan when reversed, particularly since the vocals are hard to hear clearly forwards. After a number of times through the process, I decided to copy the recording and examine it in a sound editing program.
What I discovered is that I was responding to the completely incomprehensible backwards sounds by projecting what was written in the video onto the sounds. When I examined the word Satan, I found it was "if" backwards. But the video said to hear Satan and I did. As is common, the singer gave the word "if" two musical tones in his singing, which sounds like two syllables to the ears—particularly when made strange through reversal. The "-an" in Satan has the same sound as the "i-" in "if." And an 'f' sounds like an "s".
I should note that the singer is from England and I am from America—our languages are different. I should address, also, the fact that a backwards sound is very different from a natural sound. It is possible, of course, that reversing the recording makes some sung
words sound more like some spoken words since we might sing in a
direction opposite of how we speak a word. Nonetheless, after I had identified the word Satan as "if" backwards, I heard something much more like "fay-i'." At that point, I remembered that I often hear the wrong words in a song forwards, but after repeated listening and thinking about it, I can hear the right words plain as day, eventually. The 666? It was the punctuated words "it's just a" slurred into a fourth word starting with an "s." It came out like "sat suj sti" not "six six six." Once I examined it closer, that is.
Neurologically, this is quite interesting and was a great experiment for me.
We make sense of sounds by using neurons that were created in the brain specifically to hear those sounds. If we haven't heard them before, we may hear in our minds (and seemingly in our ears) something completely different from actuality.
When making sense of what we are hearing in this backward track, we have some assistance in context. A song is composed of lines
that are essentially sentences. In the proper, forward version, the writer of this supposedly Satanic
song used grammatically correct sentences, even if they didn't make
complete sense. Interestingly, the Satan hunters do the same with the recording reversed. Even if
they have to make up nonsensical sentences that happen to contain the
word Satan, they do so. And this is one of the reasons we hear
the words we hear even when they aren't there phonetically. If you
understand the preceding word, then the following word is easier to make
out. So if, for example, Satan is darning his socks, then you really think you heard the word Satan. But did you?
The backwards sounds I listened to are sounds that I have not trained my brain to understand. Therefore, I can't really hear them. And when I am able to hear them, it will only be because I trained my brain to hear them. This is a slippery slope that can lead from hearing nonsense to reinforcing nonsense, or from hearing nonsense to climbing up the mud and overcoming the nonsense and learning to hear what's actually there.
As a musician, I am very aware of how this works. I play guitar, and have for over thirty years. When I tune my guitar, non-musicians sometimes tell me they can't tell the difference between the sound of a string before and after I've adjusted it slightly. I can tell because I've trained my brain to hear the difference. However, when I try to sing, which I rarely do, I have a hard time hearing what I am doing. Now that I am also playing a fretless guitar (I played fretless bass in the 90s), I am starting to hear something of what a violinist or cellist must hear in playing an unfretted stringed instrument. I'm not sure exactly what I am hearing—it's just an inkling now, but I will hear more as I develop. A music professor once told me he was stunned that his students can't tell a trombone from a trumpet. But it is only because they haven't trained their brains to actually hear it.
Have you noticed that speakers of a foreign
language, when they learn English (for example), have trouble confusing
certain sounds? A non-native speaker of English might get an "r" and an
"l" confused (like I got the "f" and "s" confused, but more so). The
reverse, of course, is true, as well. After four years of French, I
still have trouble hearing the language. Why is this? Because at the
critical time of our early-childhood development, we learn a native language
that differentiates between some sounds but not others. It doesn't differentiate between the sounds that are distinctly
separate in some other languages. For some, the distinction between an "r" and
an "l" is clear, but for others it may not exist at all; literally, those sounds are the same sound to their
brains and ears.
Here's another analogy using the eyes instead of the ears. Once, as a child, some older kids found something under a bush that a child ought not to know about. I didn't know the word, I didn't know the function, and I didn't know what one looks like. In short, I knew nothing about this thing. And I tried to see what they were looking at and they were laughing about and I couldn't see anything. I looked and looked until they other boys moved me along. I probably was disturbing them, but I really saw nothing at all. I was totally lost. The word stuck in my head and now I know what it was. But I have no memory of seeing anything under the bush. I couldn't see it because I didn't know it. Even after they gave me a name for it, I was lost because I had made no prior connections with which to see it and name it myself. I didn't have the neurons.
So, getting back to the music, here is complete gibberish that I have no connection to and someone is suggesting I hear the word "Satan." And I do, because I am listening for it. One online commentator said he gave the backwards soundfile, unidentified, to a friend. After hearing it, the friend asked if it was something Satanic. But even here, the recipient probably had expectations. He had to have had experience associating a backwards recording with Satanism simply from our culture. Probably, most people who hear the words Satan and 666 in this backwards track hear what someone told them to hear. They heard what they went looking for. What the first person who heard it went looking for.
The song I was examining represents a lot of scary things. Freedom, indulgence, experimentation, exoticism, poetry, imagination, fantasy, unexplainable appeal, and the magic of creativity. The lyrics were mystical and incomprehensible forwards. And it had the word "heaven" in the title and in the lyrics. It's exactly the sort of record one would look for Satan in.
Some time ago, now, someone went looking for disturbing words in the Bible. They translated it from Greek into modern English. They squished the words together and they decided upon their own chosen words to look for in the now nonsensical array of letters. They chose short words like Stalin and Hitler that would be perfect Scrabble words if they weren't proper names (proper names the leaders or their families invented for themselves because they were easy to say and spell). The Satan hunters set up a computer to find the letters in sequence at every possible interval. So they might find an "h" then 30 letters along an "i" then thirty more letters, and so on. Then they put a return at the same interval of letters so as to stack the Devilish words in a wordsearch puzzle manner and cropped into the word they "found." Put more accurately, they found what they went looking for and arranged for themselves to see.
The world is like that. And, as artists, we've always known this, but now we have neuroscience to explain it to us. When a rock group paints an abstract picture of the human experience—or when a Biblical writer does so—and we see something dark in it, perhaps we aren't being very generous to the creators, but then again, they gave us something open to broad interpretation. We're always going to bring something of ourselves to our interpretation of a work of art.
But when we play the music backwards and hear a word that isn't even there, this experience tears us completely away from the normal dynamic of the creator and the audience. It shows, for a moment, how the brain makes sense out of anything, from rock and roll to a sound outside the window to a trombone or a trumpet or the Gospel of Mark, for that matter.
Written language is fascinating, and the Satan hunters can find hidden messages anywhere in text. But music is closer to spoken language, which is more primal than the written word. And more abstract. When we sing, we change the rhythm and the tonality of familiar
words. We invite interpretation and challenge our prior understanding of language. Spoken words have a sing-song quality, too, but we speak very
formally. This formality develops more as we move past the language
acquisition stage. Listen to a child speak. They voice their words in
half-steps, often. Mom-my. Mom-my. Up or down by just one sharp or flat.
We adults (of my generation and culture) seem to do it in larger, more conventional intervals.
And a vocalist will, too, but a
vocalist has a lot of play in the syllabication and intonation of words
that he or she sings. And this is one way of disrupting our neurological
connection with words and causing us to be enamored with a piece of
music. The song I examined was largely improvised and has open
meaning to begin with (like a number of very popular tunes by various musicians, most of which get misinterpreted). Given
the mannered singing, the stream-of-consciousness writing, and the reversal of the clip, we have a very, very unfamiliar set of
language sounds to make sense of.
And we make sense of those language sounds by using neurons that we wire specifically to hear those sounds. Which means that we approach this backward recording the same way we approach music: with a trained ear, an open ear, an ignorant ear, or a prejudiced ear. Or two of the above.
