Creative time effects
Reverse audio
Backwards is the new forwards: the history of reverse audio in music
The use of reverse audio in mainstream music really took off in the mid to late 1960s. However, to find the roots of this development we have to go back a bit further and consider a couple of significant changes. The first of these was the arrival of magnetic recording tape. This new medium and accompanying reel-to-reel machines revolutionised audio recording, and first found widespread use in broadcast and audio production in the 1940s and 1950s.
Significantly, the open deck design meant that by running the tape to the end and taking the right hand spool, turning it over and reloading it onto the left-hand side of the machine, you could play your whole recording backwards.
Initially, this would have been viewed as a strange and unusable byproduct, but that was all about to change.
The second catalyst was a shift in attitudes to musical composition and in particular a progressive electronic music form known as musique concrète. Spearheaded by French composer Pierre Schaeffer, this involved a move away from scoring written notes for instrumentalists to play. Instead composition used snippets of recorded audio or ‘concrete sounds’, thus placing the composer in control of not only the notes but also the final sound. Combined with the newly available taperecording technology, musique concrète was able to use a multitude of tape techniques including micromontage (joining together small snippets), looping, pitch variation and of course reverse audio. The movement attracted a bunch of avant-garde composers, including one Karlheinz Stockhausen. He then took these ideas back to Germany and the studio of German national broadcaster (WDR) where he began to combine electronic synthesis, musique concrète and other compositional techniques.