It is not difficult to imagine the places of applying the knowledge of how to implicitly share some information entered into the mass culture artifacts. Today, in most cases, there is absolutely no practical need to hide some messages in music - these are just nice bonuses for especially ardent fans of musical groups. The incorporation of the messages into the words of the songs and the changing colors of the drawings in the design of music albums are, of course, not considered here.

Let's start with simple methods that are not related to computer science and computing. It is most obvious to impose such sounds that, in reproducing a gramophone record in the opposite direction, on a domestic electric player or special equipment will give legible human speech.
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Backmasking

The potential of such a technique was seen by the inventor of the phonograph Thomas Edison, and for the first time electronic music pioneers took advantage of it in the 50s of the last century, although, of course, we are obliged to popularize backmasking techniques to the Beatles group. In particular, under the influence of marijuana, Lennon rolled the films backwards, and he was very interested in the sound received. The first song with the hidden message was Rain .

Censorship thus circumvented, for example, Frank Zappa, whose record label did not miss some of the lines.


_{Better look.
Shut your f ... ing mouth 'bout the length of my hair.
How would you survive, if you were alive, shitty little person?}

Less well known is the overlayed or slow motion overlay of human speech, which Jimi Hendrix used for the song Third Stone from the Sun. If you speed up the version of the track in The Jimi Hendrix Experience: 1966–1967 twice (or play a record at 33⅓ revolutions per minute at a speed of 45), you can hear the distinct dialogue of space aliens portrayed by Jimi and his manager.


_{Hendrix: Star fleet to scout ship, please give your position. Over.
Chandler: I am in orbit around the third planet. Over.
Hendrix: May this be Earth? Over.
Chandler: Positive. Form of intelligent species. Over.
Hendrix: I think we should take a look. (Jimi publishes the ecstasy of a spacecraft)}

The decline in interest in hiding messages in the opposite direction or in playback with increased speed is associated primarily with the transition to digital media, the players of which do not always have the functionality to reverse playback and its acceleration. Do not hide the creation in the late 80s in California and some other states of the bills against laying messages in music: the fanaticism of the search for Easter eggs helped to find the “messages of the Antichrist” almost everywhere. The beginning of the rumors about the death of Paul McCartney put it backmasking.

Figures in the spectrogram

It is easy to get a spectrogram, is it possible to restore sound by a spectrogram? Yes, but with significant approximations, which doesn’t hurt to create music that you don’t need to listen to - you’ll still get a creepy metal chime, but look. Such music is, for example, the side B track of the Windowlicker single by the British electronic musician Aphex Twin, most often called “Equation” or “Formula”, but having a more startling name:





Skip to 5:30 to see Richard's patented smirk. Admission was not new even in the 99th year: for example, this is the end of the Windowlicker track:



It is easy to guess what will be on the Look track of the glitch album Songs About My Cats.

Using media features

On vinyl plastic, it is possible to print two tracks, as has sometimes happened. For example, in the original edition of The Monty Python Matching Tie and Handkerchief of 1973, not only were the sides of the plates not signed, and there was no track list, there were also two parallel paths on each side on side B. To listen to a hidden song on the "three-sided" plate, only a successful needle installation was necessary.



Mad Magazine turned the same trick on the disc It's a Super Spectacular Day, there were only 8 tracks. Each of them colorfully painted troubles that can happen to you today. Records in several tracks were popular back in the 50s, but, as a rule, they were used only in discs with audio stories for children, which made it possible to get several different stories from one double-sided disc.

The data format of the CD, described in the Red Book, allows the so-called pregap - indent from the first track. By default, it lasts two seconds and contains silence. Many musicians placed in pregap audio materials. Unfortunately, the update in Windows 95 made it impossible for the system to access the pregap of the first track, apparently to support the CD-Extra format. However, digital data can be placed in the following way.

Vinyl, Modem Signal, ZX Spectrum and Programs

How to write a text file on a vinyl record? The American Information Society team was able to do it easily: track title 300bps N, 8, 1 (Terminal Mode or Ascii Download) of the album Peace and Love, Inc. explicitly indicated how to read their message. A 300 baud modem made it possible to receive a text file containing the group’s account of the pressure on them by Brazilian state structures. It is not clear why they chose such a strange format for the story.



The track name CLOAD "Q" for the album Information Retrieved Pt. B is the command to download the Q file in BASIC TRS-80, the personal computer of the early 80s. As you can see, the indie band Pinback for some reason put a game on the album for a long-obsolete computer.



In the early years of the spread of personal computer equipment, the sound for recording tapes of the ZX Spectrum was even broadcast on television. There were also tracks that were entirely programs, and if they were vinyl albums, they needed to be rewritten onto tape. Most often, this technique was used by teams from the UK.

For example, the sixth track of the British editions of the XL1 album by Pete Shelley contained ripples of sounds, which, being uploaded to Spectrum, were rudimentary graphics and lyrics, played in sync with the playback of the album. For the same informational purposes, the Hectic Electric track from the New Anatomy album of the Inner City Unit was used: the program contained a schedule of performances, a description of the band, tracks, etc.

Thompson Twins released a whole video game on vinyl. This is a typical text quest, which is unlikely to be of interest to people who have never left a move card after hours of play on a notebook sheet.




The Camouflage single by Chris Sivi included the awesome Flying Train created by the musician. She was remarkable only by their explosions. Chris also wrote The Biz , a game not included in the album, which is a simulator of a successful musical group that is experiencing a rapid career growth.



The most ironic message for the ZX Spectrum was created by the Scottish group Urusei Yatsura: the program simply displayed the message "Praise Satan." The code also contained comments "Hello, Nick, Robin at you?", "Satanic Message No. 3 from the Priest of Judas", "What is sadder: a) to find it b) to write it".



One way or another, but musicians of past years have been experimenting a lot with their fans, which today, unfortunately, is less observed.