Music Banter - View Single Post - so-called subliminal messages in songs?

Zyrada · 08-12-2012, 07:18 PM

The legitimacy of backmasking as some kind of subliminal tool has been pretty effectively discredited for a while. There's an old study from 1985 that takes the whole issue to task in reaction to the hysteria of some Christian groups that smashed records at large gatherings. For reference, the study is "Subliminal Messages: Between the devil and the media" by John Vokey and J. Read. When they were working with their subjects, they found that even their ability to determine the language and word content of the backmasked material was a crapshoot (55.8% recognition of a forward-read word that had just been in a backmasked sentence doesn't exactly suggest any kind of comprehension).

08-12-2012, 07:18 PM	#4 (permalink)
Zyrada Avant-Gardener Join Date: Jul 2011 Location: Inside your navel gazing back at you Posts: 163	The legitimacy of backmasking as some kind of subliminal tool has been pretty effectively discredited for a while. There's an old study from 1985 that takes the whole issue to task in reaction to the hysteria of some Christian groups that smashed records at large gatherings. For reference, the study is "Subliminal Messages: Between the devil and the media" by John Vokey and J. Read. When they were working with their subjects, they found that even their ability to determine the language and word content of the backmasked material was a crapshoot (55.8% recognition of a forward-read word that had just been in a backmasked sentence doesn't exactly suggest any kind of comprehension).