Subliminal Messages in Songs

There's always some controversy when someone suggests that there could be subliminal messages in songs.

How dare the record companies try to influence us without telling us?!

There have been claims for years that some rock music contains subliminal messages. Originally, it was a suggestion that there were satanic messages if you played certain songs backwards. Now, I don't know whether or not you've tried to listen to any track backwards but it usually makes even less sense than it does when played normally. My guess is that these claims were made to give the bands concerned some extra publicity.

But it is perfectly possible for any song to have a subliminal message added as an extra "track". Chances are, you'd never notice it.

In fact, if you were playing the song on your MP3 player, not only would you not notice the subliminal track but it almost certainly wouldn't be there, even if it was present on the original recording. That's because the MP3 file format is designed to compress down in size. The way that compression is performed is that a software program removes parts of the track that the human ear won't notice. Bye bye subliminal messages then!

Of course, if the original CD contained a subliminal message and you listened to it from the original CD, using a good quality player and decent speakers or headphones, then yes, you would still experience the subliminal message contained in the song. But nowadays, there's not too much chance of that. You'll more likely be listening on your iPod.