Strange |
Doing Strange Things To Music
Binary Numbers There have been rumors for centuries that certain pieces of music had hidden messages incorporated into them. Since music is really mathematical, that is, it is composed of numbers. Each note can have a numerical equivalent and since any alphabet has letters in a certain order it wouldn't be too hard to do. For example if the equivalent of a note played was 5 that would be an “e”, if a code wasn't used. If a code was used that would change, but using straight forward alphabetical equivalents you can see how this would work. I guess it would take a very clever composer to make the music sound good and still get his message across. Every time I turn on the television I see something on the History Channel concerning prophesy. They are now claiming all sorts of people may have been prophets. I wonder why they have never examined the music from the great composers to see if perhaps there were messages in it. It might turn out that someone like Beethoven was a profit.
Music CD Not all hidden messages in music are letter equivalents There are other techniques that are used to mask or hide messages in music. One of these is called backward masking or backmasking. You might have seen this referred to in a movie or two. This is where there is a message in a song, but you have to play the recording backwards to hear it. It is also said that somehow this can happen unintentionally. The Beatles did this on purpose when they cut the album Revolver in 1966. Some Christian groups have been claiming for years that this technique has been used on some recordings for Satanic purposes. They felt so strongly that they proposed legislation to prevent backmasking on recordings.
Piano Maybe the idea that backmasking was somehow evil was prompted by several books. One book for magicians from the early 20th century advised magicians to play records backwards to help them to think backwards when perfecting magic tricks. I personally don't see how this would help, but the author of the book, a magician thought that it would. As recording tape became popular with record makers, backmasking began to see more and more use. Do you wonder why the Beatles backmasked some songs? John Lennon had said that while he was smoking marijuana, he played the song Rain backwards and liked it. With all that marijuana in him he probably would have liked anything. The next day he played it again for the rest of the Beatles and they decided to use this effect in some of their music. An interesting event occurred concerning the Beatles. Apparently the radio station WKNR-FM received a phone call stating that Paul McCartney had died and if they played Revolution 9 backwards they would hear a message confirming this. They did and everyone heard “Turn me on, dead man...turn me on, dead man...., turn me on, dead man. Many different message were attributed to the Beatles records when they were played backwards. I am not a fan of Led Zeppelin, but some say the if you play their Stairway to Heaven backwards you can hear a satanic message. I have no way of knowing if this is true or false since I have none of their music and as a matter of fact, I am probably one of the very few people in this country that do not own even 1 music cd. There are many people that believe that the environment is stronger than will power and therefore it follows that hidden messages in music can get us to do things that we normally wouldn't. I don't really believe this, but there are those out there that absolutely do and blame music in many ways for the actions of others. They claim that some music contains subliminal messages that cause us to act out and we don't even realize we are doing it. They think that these messages in the music program get our brains to act in a way that the composer of the piece wanted it to, much in the way that software instructs our computers to carry out different tasks. If you play the Britney Spears song Baby One More Time backwards you will hear, “sleep with me, I'm not too young”. I heard this myself when I played a clip on the Internet backwards. If you play a song by Queen, Another One Bites The Dust, in reverse and listen carefully, you will hear, “I like to smoke marijuana”. Are some of these messages accidental? I would think so, if you have enough music out there and we do, then there is bound to be words when played backwards that sound like something else and may even form sentences. Mostly though this stuff is done on purpose I am sure. Getting back to deriving text from music, one of the ways to encode a message in music is to use one note every so often to represent a letter of the alphabet, instead of using every note. When the piece is played, if it is composed correctly, the code will be undetectable to the human ear. These innocent sounding musical pieces can then be sent to other people who have the key or posted on a site for free download. When this happens the song is usually downloaded by many thousands of people making it almost impossible to trace it to one person. This is a big problem for intelligence agencies. Think of it this way, you are in law enforcement and you get a tip that there is a piece of music on the Internet that has a secret message for a terrorist group. Unless you know the exact piece, it would be impossible to search all the music. Even knowing the song title, it might still be a problem because if it is a popular song that was altered there might be millions of clips of that song out there. There are other ways to encode secret messages that make it almost impossible to discover and one way is to put them into the data for a photo or graphic. There are billions of photos and graphics on the Internet, probably more photos than even songs and musical pieces, making discovering them an almost impossible task. Even if some supercomputer was used to sift through all the songs and photos on the net, it would be an impossible task due to the sheer volume of all this stuff and the amount of new material that is added every day. |
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