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Reverse Speech


Steveo
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This (if true) is a really amazing phenomena, REVERSE SPEECH!

Appareently we all do is through a mecanism of the subconcious mind and the REVERSE SPEECH is apparently the truth whereas forward speech is often a lie or a cover up, listen and post your opinion! :blink:

The Hidden Language

Edited by Steveo
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LOL I find it appears to be carefully edited to find the places where reversing the tape says something the oposite and what happens with the rest of the conversation instead of a little snippet.

a little snip here a little snip there and you got a new religion.

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I dont know about reverse speech but when I was living in the Boston area about 10 or so years ago I knew a 20 something guy who from a very young age could talk and sing backward all with perfect diction and pitch when recorded.

He was studied by the people at MIT and apparently had some sort of different wiring. His was a natural ability although some people do set out to learn it...

This isnt him (his pronounciation was much better) but a little example of something similar I found on youtube

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People have a hard enough time communicating in forward. Why would they even try to understand reverse?? That is weird. It reminded me of churches who try to prove rock music is devilish when they play it backwards.

Paul is dead

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You might enjoy a book I've been reading Steveo - "Musicophilia" - Tales of Music and the Brain, by Oliver Sacks. He's a doctor and professor of neurology and psychiatry at Columbia University Medical Center. Written a few other books. The book deals with a range of study and observation he's done on the human brain, mind and how music fits into "the human condition". Very readable and lots of good stuff in it, thought provoking.

I know people often will say the opposite of what they mean, and not intend it.

Also I've noticed what I'd call a kind of phenomena in today's culture where - it appears that so much is going on in a person's life at any given point, so many "distractions", the phone, a message that needs to be answered, an errand forgotten but needing to be done, a project underway, a meeting in an hour they dont' want to forget about, etc. etc. etc. ...

That some or all of those things inevitably inform what they're doing "right now", to the extent that they hear or listen through the maze of that filter of distractions. In that way they can often hear a completely different version of what someone else says, because of what they bring to the conversation.

It's rare to find a "clear" moment with someone today. It's as if ADD is in the water or something.

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Socks, I love Oliver Sacks! And his book Musicophilia actually describes something weird I have. I have some hearing loss and tinnitus since a couple of bouts of Lyme disease.

I remember picking up the phone receiver (I have a land line), and thinking, "What's wrong with this phone? The dialtone sounds low." Then one day, I switched it to my other ear. It sounded higher. I actually hear a half-tone lower than true pitch out of my left ear. If I concentrate, I can hear the true pitch from both ears (it may be like having a dominant eye), like the book describes. But sometimes, music on the radio sounds totally dissonant!

Strange how the ear-mind connection works.

-- Shaz

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WOW! How cool. I'm glad to find another fan! That's a very interesting hearing phenomena you're experiencing. Very interesting. Not to rail this track sideways too much, but what kind of effect does it have on normal hearing of room noise, and "ambient" sound, stuff just going on? (I had a doctor help me years ago in a general exam, where I asked about what I experience in hearing and the relationship to color. A wide range of mid-level and high range tones have a color tone for me and I never found it unnatural until I started performing in clubs, stages, etc. where light was so contrasted. Some tones have a color theme that I "see" in my brain's eyes. He tested my hearing, which turned out to be very sensitive in those ranges. I can hear whispering clearly, 30-40 feet away but other sounds I can't. He suggested at the time I have "synesthesia". He covers that in the book too.)

I've done informal study myself on reverse audio, when software started to make it so easy to do I started experimenting with reversing small portions of audio, tiny bits and fiddling with them. I started with a small program that played an audio file, of clearly spoken words, and assigned a note value to each. That score can then be played, note for note.

One of his points made in the book is that while speech isn't truly "music" it has the basic components of volume variances, tone (in inflection of words and phrases) and rhythm so in a way you can have a musical sense of speech, more noticeable in some people than others. So it is possible to "play" speech, without the words and just get the musical representation of it. (although it's difficult and time consuming to get it exact, least for me).

In that way our understanding of speech - words strung together - is expanded by how they sound to us, and different people hear them differently. It seemed to me that changes in those three elements - tone, volume and rhythm - would drastically change the result I "heard" and in fact, when broken down to those components without the words, were very different when played.

Reversed - totally different. VERY different.

Not sure what that means. Sumpin'. :)

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People have a hard enough time communicating in forward. Why would they even try to understand reverse?? That is weird. It reminded me of churches who try to prove rock music is devilish when they play it backwards.

If you play rock and roll backwards, you get Satanic messages.

If you play C&W music backwards, you get your wife and your dog back.

If you play New Age music backwards, you get...New Age music!

:)

George

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This reverse speech thing has to do with the corruption of language over time.

Long ago reverse speech said exactly the same thing as forward.

Here's proof, an earliest of quotes where the uncials are all strung together: "MADAMIMADAM.'

Hey, I didn't write the book!

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This reverse speech thing has to do with the corruption of language over time.

Long ago reverse speech said exactly the same thing as forward.

Here's proof, an earliest of quotes where the uncials are all strung together: "MADAMIMADAM.'

Hey, I didn't write the book!

One of the earliest of quotes was written in English?

Well, I'll be---

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Moving right along...

You might enjoy a book I've been reading Steveo - "Musicophilia" - Tales of Music and the Brain, by Oliver Sacks. He's a doctor and professor of neurology and psychiatry at Columbia University Medical Center. Written a few other books. The book deals with a range of study and observation he's done on the human brain, mind and how music fits into "the human condition". Very readable and lots of good stuff in it, thought provoking.

But seriously folks...

I too am an Oliver Sacks fan. He wrote a book titled "Awakenings" that later became a movie, where Robin Williams played the role of Dr. Sacks.

In that book (and I think the movie too) a certain reflex act of impulsively catching thrown objects is discovered and discussed. I myself have experienced this phenomenon. No kidding. It was uncanny how much more accurate it was than when I've consciously played baseball.

Sacks has a lot of fans.

Edited by Mike
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George, that was funny! "you get your wife and dog back...New Age is still New Age..."

Kimberly, you mean palindromes. Like, "Madam, I'm Adam" and "name no one man" and "able was I ere I saw Elba." I love that stuff. Funny, Mike!

{Warning: complete derail:} Sox, I mostly notice the tone thing when I'm listening to the radio. Sometimes I'm thinking, "What is wrong with my radio signal?" or "I don't remember a modulation in that verse." Some Top 40 has assumed a twelve-tone Stravinsky influence. :D

Because of the hearing loss, hearing speech has now become a combination for me of speech, lip-reading, the musicality of what is spoken (I totally know what you mean), and body language (reading movement was always my thing). Ambient noise (busy restaurant, loud HVAC) means I often can't understand what is said at all, even with 2 hearing aids in. Whispering is unintelligible. It's sometimes frustrating, and a long day of meetings can be tiring.

Synthesesia, wow! Do you feel that your melody or harmony choices are influenced by the colors you perceive? Do harmonious tones correspond to colors that go together, or is there no particular rhyme or reason to which colors go with which pitch?

{Back to the topic} And yeah, the pitch, stress, and lilt of language backwards is completely different than forwards. I like the idea of converting a sentence to a melody. I had done some experimenting with translating words to movement, and the musicality of a sentence into movement -- moving up and down with pitch, fast and slow, emphatic or monotone. We are such emotional creatures, even in the moment of a single sentence.

There ya go,

Shaz

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I gotta ponder that, shaz. I may offline ya a message, to avoid meandering too much here. That's fascinating though, as "hearing loss" is so varied. For years I played LOUD, near an amp or speaker and back in the day those had to be as big as possible. :) By the time I went back to smaller amps my ears had started that ringing stuff. It went away over time for the most part and for years now I take small ear plugs wherever I think the volume might be too loud and may pop 'em in if I feel I need to. Buuuut - I do occasionally get that high ring going for a sec, usually if I'm tired seems.

I do find that tones, certain keys, have a visual "home" for me. It's hard to describe and Sacks helps to understand it a little better although I just take it for granted. Things sound different colors (not everything though), in kind of off-tint shades. I like G and A, which range loosely from a "green" to a "blue". Dill tastes "blue" to me and feels like something between an A and D. Not sure what any of that means, either.

But the reversal of language, if it has any meaning, would rely to an extent on the sound quality of the words spoken. The words themselves are only collected sounds anyway. It's really clear when you break them out into individual tones. Like the word - "malarkey"...... ma-LAR-key.....eekRAHLum....if I change the inflection to emphasize the MA and stetch it out - MA-lar-key .... reversed will sound like....eekral-UUUUM....and sound more frantic, almost scared. Or what I might associate with that.

I think that will have a huge effect on interpretation of reversed speech, my layman's guess. Something completely benign can sound quite weird and wicked if spoken differently and that change in emphasis might not be weird or wicked at all, in the orignal. The overall "envelop" of a sound, and how it starts, enters, continues, fluctuates, and degrades out - all would establish the sound of a word. The rhythmic aspect is huge - a single "beat", can be subdivided - you can be on the beat, ahead of it, behind it and still be what would be considered "on beat", although in a large enough sampling like a "song" or sentence that would determine how it sounds - easy going, "lazy", snappy, "tight", etc.

Again - not sure what any of this means, but it uh, sounds like fun! :biglaugh:

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wonderful thread...playing in the fields of inter-subjectivity...

has me wondering how all these directly felt channels of oral transmission compare

to what is felt or heard or seen while reading, writing, typing, hypertexting

...singing...dancing...kissing....spitting...whatnot

Edited by sirguessalot
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Yah Mo to that, Sir.

I had done some experimenting with translating words to movement, and the musicality of a sentence into movement (Shaz)

That would be a very fruitful endeavor methinks, definitely to think through what and how to interpret it as a musical statement into movement. Developing the words, the language. And stuff like sarcasm. What does it look like without the words?

Sarcasm is a perfect example of something that would be interesting to reverse and compare. The sound isn't unique -

"Oh yeah, I REALly like that...a LOT".

That can mean more than one thing. With a roll of the eyes, the same reaction (in our culture today anyway) can be communicated without any words at all.

Or even with just the words some people won't "get" the sarcasm and take it at face value.

Cuz if I really liked that, a LOT, that's exactly the way I'd say it.

Or would I? Would there be minute changes in tone, differentiators?

One thing for sure, reversed the sound and rhythm of something said will sound very different and THEREFORE communicate a different meaning - but is that the correct or "true" meaning and what does it mean if it is?

I'm of the mind that the sound of what we say defines it as much and possibly more than what we actually say. That because we are more capable to quickly craft our words (okay, some of us sometimes) to say something other than what we really mean, whereas the sounds of it are more difficult to shape in real time.

I think... :biglaugh:

Thus, someone can listen to you and by the "sound" of your voice detect ... something ... and ask "is everything alright?" or ... need to clarify what you mean because to them, the sound is out of character with the words.

?

Context, environment, common ground would seem to play into this, although there must be certain sounds that are inherently common to all humans. Happy, calm, fear, etc. ?

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So after looking through the website link Steveo, I'm kind of in a state of denial on what he's proposing.

I looked for studies that would examine the process using a double blind testing environment and validation of the results post-testing, where the reversed message could be produced and it determined if they're actually valid representations of something.

The music examples are ludicrous - Hendrix's quote from the song "Red House" comes out "Night before, think I'll go to Santa Rosa" -

He interprets that to mean his mind was "somewhere else". While that might go without saying in Hendrix's case, it's obviously not based on anything other than this guy's interpretation. (and Hendrix is known to not have been the total junkie when working and definitely had his mind on what he was doing in recording environments)

Plus, the meaning or usefulness is zippidy doo until his pitch to sell this "service" to business - this quote is something else:

An inexpensive speech analysis session can provide the most relevant information from the ultimate source, your own unconscious mind. Why not go to the source and uncover hidden information to help you make the right decisions in planning, investing, resource allocation, hiring, partnerships and joint ventures? As a certified RS Investigator I will elicit enough subconscious information from your own words during our session to give you the edge in any business environment.

I'd like to know how he got certified and what that really means. I see his credentials are respectable but I have to wonder where he got this idea.

My own feeling is that randomly reversed speech doesn't tell you much by trying to assign words to the sounds. Anyone can tell by listening that the words he assigns are stretches in nearly every case, and rely on the tones and inflections used.

If I took several samples of the same speech information, I doubt they'd line up the same way every time, in fact I'm sure they won't.

Record a conversation over the phone, in the morning, using a set of predetermined questions. Repeat in person, seated at a table late in the day. Repeat again standing up, in a hallway. Do a few repeats of that so there's two samples for each environment.

Then reverse the answers, and compare the sounds of the results.

His ability to influence what a listener thinks they hear in the reversals effects the outcome more than anything else. I don't hear half of what he says he does. Plus, the recordings stink. All of that ambient noise, artifacts from the recording process and compression into the Flash files he's using - it ain't woikin' for me. Too squishy.

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I was just assigned a student who's 8, this is the way he writes.

samtsirhc doog a evah t’ndid ehs

I wanted some samples before I figured out a goal plan for him so I asked him some questions and asked him to write them down.

That says "she didn't have a good christmas"

He write it as fast, and from left to right, as I do the way I wrote it.

Fascinating, really, but he's got a lot! of work ahead of him.

This is also the way he reads the words.

Not related to the thread, necessarily, but made me think of the little guy. Cool kid.

Edited by Shellon
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