Backmasking?

Question

Please don't direct me to other sites, just how does subliminal messaging work? Is there like a sound wheel, where each sound has an opposite or something? Or is it that the sounds are just reversed, like Molly is eellom, or Jordan is nadroj?

Answer 1

Don't confuse backmasking with subliminal messaging. Subliminal messages are supposedly those that your consciousness is barely aware of but which are "understood" by your subconscious.

I've never heard any credible evidence that backmasking can result in subliminal messages. That would require a mechanism in your subconscious brain that is able to reverse the sound and make sense of it. Studies (see the Wiki article) have shown that backmasking seems to have no perceptible effect on the listeners, so I don't think you could rightly call it subliminal messaging.

Having said that--

If you want to create some backmasking just for fun, you can either just run a voice recording backwards, or (if you want to be more creative), break the phrase into "phonemes" and then speak the phonemes in reverse order.

A "phoneme" is the smallest distinct sound you can make when you talk. There are something like 42 of them in English. Think of a phoneme as being each speech sound that you can make without changing the position of your tongue, jaw, lips, etc. For example:

"I have a dog"

That consists of these 9 phonemes:

AH, EE, H, A, V, UH, D, AH, G

So speak them in reverse order into a recorder:

G, AH, D, UH, V, A, H, EE, AH

Which would sound something like, "God of Ahee-ah". With a little practice, you can record it so that when you play it backwards, it will sound like "I have a dog."