Note: includes stories of suicide
Humans have an amazing ability to understand their own language across a wide variety of accents, dialects, speech defects, and even other languages with mutual, or asymmetrical, intelligibility. We often recognise the common patterns and fill in any blanks not quite heard properly. Of course, there are limits to this. The late great Stanley Unwin built a bizarrely long career on pushing this boundary.
The French have a wonderfully descriptive phrase: Chanter en Yaourt – or Yogurt Singing. It refers to the non-English speaker’s difficulty in singing along to popular English language songs, replacing actual words with phrasing that sounds like English – as if sung into a yoghurt pot. For example, here is French comedian Gad Elmaleh singing Chanson en Anglais, and a famous Italian version by Adrian Celentano, with his 1972 classic Prisencolinensinainciusol.
But even English speakers can have difficulties following along in many songs and will often add words and phrases they have either invented or at least misinterpreted. Boomers will remember well the TV adverts for Maxell cassettes that played on this phenomenon. How many of you who can remember one featuring the Desmond Dekker classic 1969 reggae song The Israelites, cannot listen to the original without hearing ‘Ooooo, me ears are alight’.
Maxell’s advertisers took the idea Bob Dylan had used in the video for Subterranean Homesick Blues (for younger readers: think Andrew Lincoln’s cringe-inducing Cards on the doorstep moment in Love Actually) but showed misheard lyrics on the cards to demonstrate that their cassette recordings were much clearer than their rivals.
There’s at least three separate phenomena at play: Otosis, mishearing or misinterpretation of spoken sounds, and the alteration in word forms due to it; Audio pareidolia, the experience of hearing words or other sounds in seemingly random noise; and priming, the exposure to a certain stimulus (the cards) affecting the understanding of another (lyrical interpretation).
These effects might just be an interesting psychological experience, but they can and still do have real-world, detrimental effects for people.
Tragic cases
Just a couple of days before Christmas 1985, two young men in the town of Sparks, Nevada, parked in their local church’s car park. After a day consuming alcohol and smoking cannabis, they used a shotgun to end their lives. 18-year-old Raymond Belknap died immediately, while 20-year-old James Vance survived, albeit with severe facial injuries. Though he had numerous medical treatments, he died three years later.
Both men were described by the New York Times as ‘troubled’: “high school dropouts with criminal records […] both had problems holding jobs. Each also came from a family with a history of domestic violence and child abuse and had received counselling”. After the incident, Vance declared himself to be a born-again Christian and, in an effort to offer an explanation, wrote to Belknap’s parents: “I believe that alcohol and heavy-metal music such as Judas Priest led us to be mesmerized”.
For the uninitiated, Judas Priest are a British heavy metal band, formed in Birmingham in the late 1960s. Over the years, they have sold over 50 million albums and were formative in various aspects of metal music. The songs often focus on common tropes of the genre such as quasi-religiosity, life, death, and even themes of violence.
In 1984, the year before the incident took place, three similar instances where young men died by suicide were blamed by grieving families on the boys’ love of heavy metal music. The parents of John McCollum, a 19-year-old who had taken his own life in California, specifically blamed CBS records, their artist Ozzy Osborne and his song Suicide Solution.
The court case was dismissed before trial on the grounds of First-Amendment rights to free expression, just a month before Belknap and Vance drove to the church carpark. As a result, the other two cases waiting to proceed were rendered moot.
Read it back to me
Lawyers for Belknap and Vance’s family understood that they could not now pursue a similar action against Judas Priest, however they claimed that there were hidden messages in the band’s song Better by You, Better Than Me. Specifically, subliminal ‘back-masked’ messages compelling the listener to “Let’s be dead”, and “Do it”. This time the trial judge rejected CBS’s lawyers’ plea to dismiss out of hand. Judge Jerry Carr Whitehead ruled that such subliminal messages were not a form of speech and therefore were not covered by First Amendment protections.
Back-masking was a technique discovered in the age of magnetic tape recordings, where a sound, or a spoken or sung phrase, was added to a track backwards to introduce an interesting and novel soundscape. The Beatles made use of it quite extensively and, throughout the 1970s, rock bands would add little Easter eggs that were eagerly sought out by fans. For example, Pink Floyd’s 1979 The Wall included the secret message: “Hello, Looker. Congratulations. You’ve just discovered the secret message. Please send your answer to Old Pink, care of the funny farm, Chalfont” on the Empty Spaces track.
Over time, the use of back-masking became something of a rock-music cliché. So much so that even one of the first ever – and at the time most popular – Christian rock bands, Petra, added the back-masked message: “What are you looking for the devil for, when you ought to be looking for the Lord?” to their 1982 song Judas’ Kiss.
This conflation with “looking for the devil” came from the rising Christian ‘Born-again’ movement that grew rapidly in the 1970s and into the 1980s. They often equated rock music with sin, drugs, demonism and leading their youth away from Jesus. Just as the kids were looking for secret messages, soon, so too were the parents.
There was a precedent for the idea that playing music backwards was equated with the Devil. The occultist Aleister Crowley suggested in 1913 that his followers should: “train himself to think backwards by external means”, one of which was to “listen to phonograph records, reversed”. Coincidentally the Album that Osbourne’s Suicide Solution track appears – Blizzard of Oz – contains the track Mr Crowley.
Just as the Christian right was focusing its ire on rock music, so back-masking become synonymous in churches and religious media with the devil and evil. In 1992, one self-described neuroscientist – William Yarroll – became a proponent of the idea that the rock stars the kids were listening to were actively working with the Church of Satan to corrupt the youth of America.
Soon the idea that hidden, subliminal messages were a thing spread to legislators and in 1983, bills either outlawing the practice, or at least mandating a warning notice on the record sleeve, were introduced in Arkansas and California. At a hearing in the latter, the investigating committee heard the Led Zeppelin track Stairway to Heaven backwards, where Robert Plant appears to praise “My Sweet Satan” (he doesn’t).
If you think the Devil is everywhere, once you start looking for him, you will see him everywhere.
Primed
All this ridiculous furore ended with Judas Priest’s frontman swapping his denim and leather for a sombre suit and testifying at a trial where he was accused of causing the death of his fans. The band eventually went out and bought various recordings, played them backwards to the court and primed the judge to hear innocuous and ridiculous phrases in otherwise unblemished music.
Once you prime recipients, they will hear what they then expect to hear, in what is otherwise just noise. That is especially the case for noise that sounds like speech – because it is a human voice, using the same cadence and patterns expected in the listeners language – and there is a natural instinct to hear what you expect or want to hear.
The trial, of course, was eventually dismissed, but not before CBS and the band had had to spend a small fortune on lawyers, and take time out of a touring schedule to attend. As the band’s manager later pointed out, if they had wanted to put in secret messages encouraging the kids to do something, they would have got them to buy more records.
The problem of priming either hard-to-hear speech or noise is not just a historical problem that went away with the advent of Compact Discs, it still has current effects. Recently, the Guardian reported on an election campaigner in Dudley in England, caught on a Ring doorbell camera allegedly making racist remarks to a colleague. Of course both she, and the Asian councillor she was campaigning with, strenuously deny saying anything that could be construed as racist. But Once the TikTok video went viral, with the added priming of on-screen prejudicial words over very faint speech, then listeners heard what they wanted to hear.
We must be very careful about believing what we want hear, and with AI’s ability to mimic individuals’ speech, this is not going to get any easier in future.
