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Glass Onion Hidden Message
Hello!
Has anyone else figured out the little hidden message the Twins left in their version of Glass Onion?
I would like to know if you have and I’d like to propose another challenge. I’ve always been drawn to things like the “double groove” album Monty Python did, and I’ve come up with a way to leave hidden messages in the digital age.
In the clip below of Once Upon A Time (fantastic song btw) I’ve embedded a warm little message from the Twins, can anyone tell what it is, or is it just a clip from the song??
Happy 2019 full of MLT!
Tomás
PS: This is what one does for fun with insomnia 😉
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22 Replies
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The Glass Onion hidden message is still a mystery to me.  “Leave and be it….”???? I hope someone can enlighten me.
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Hi Jung,
I hear at the end “yvurgy ets (sigh)Â yvurgy ets (sigh)Â yvurgy ets (sigh) …”
But I have to admit that I had to hear it backwards to figure it out. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
On the clip that I posted above you’ll hear two different things if you listen to it on a phone with or without headphones.
Stay Groovy!
Tomás
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Hi Tomás
How do you play it backwards? I’m a technological hillbilly! As for ‘Once Upon A Time’, the only thing I notice is that the sound changes and seems to come from a different source/direction/volume on a couple of occasions.
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I’ve a hard time hearing with whispers and low voices in general so I’m sorry but I can’t help you out or know what is being said .. Wish I could dicipher and hear what it is better than I’m able to????
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Tomas, thanks. I think I get it now from what you wrote.  yvurgy ets (sigh), played backwards. I’ll have to figure a way out to play Glass Onion backwards to actually hear the message.
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Jung, to play backwards now a days you need audio editing software, and they have an option to reverse the recording, so it’s pretty simple if you have the software and have some knowledge on how to use it.
As a teenager I had the LP’s and I’d just turn on the record player so that the needle was active but the tray not spinning, then just sit the needle on the record and manually spin it backwards. I found out early that all that “turn me on dead man” and “I buried Paul” was BS.
With cassette tapes it was a bit trickier but more reliable, once you got the cassette inverted. I would wind the tape all to on end, then open it up and flip the reels so that the tape would play upside down, close it back up, then fast forward the tape all the way to the other end before playing it or the tape would get bunched up. Listening to full songs backwards at the right speed was quite something, especially “Rain”.
So here’s what I’ve done with “Once upon a time”. Howard, you’re right that the sound sort of shifts, and that’s where some experimenting will come it to make those transitions more “inaudible”. With some knowledge of how sound waves work, especially when two or more sounds overlap each other and the waves are “added” together, I have mixed the sound waves of a part of “Once Upon A Time” and a clip of the twins mentioning the community. I’ve done it in such a way that depending on how you listen to it, you hear the song (maybe if you listen carefully you notice there are some voices buried deep talking under it -Jacki-) or you hear a completely different recording. The second clip starts with the same music, but then the music stops altogether and the twins do their speech (which I took from one of their videos) and ends with it going back to the music clip. Where the music “shifts” is where you (Howard) hear that phasing, in the clip that’s all music, and there is where the recording “splits” into two, and later merges back. I chose the audio clip and the music clip so that the words on both would complement each other.
If you hear it in stereo then you are hearing the all music clip, but if you hear it in mono, then you are hearing the twins speak. The easiest way I found to play things in true mono these days is to hear it through the speaker of a smartphone. I don’t know if any smartphone has stereo speakers, all the ones I know are mono. So playing it on a phone on the speakerphone the two channels are mixed into one and that’s when the magic happens. I found it interesting that if you’re on a smartphone and you a listening with headphones, then you unplug the headphones and suddenly you’re listening to something different altogether.
Another way to listen in mono on your computer is to set your speakers to mono in the sound settings, if you know how to do that.
What can I say, I’m a geek and a nerd. Thank you for putting up with me and bearing through it, I find these things fascinating. Today’s technology is magic to our ancestors, so what future technology is today’s magic?
I also hope Mona, Lisa, Michaela and Rudi are OK with me playing with their music in this manner! And I trust that they will let me know if they don’t think it’s OK for me to do so.
And last but not least, Stay Groovy!!
Tomás
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I don’t know if you are a geek or a nerd, Tomas, but methinks you have way too much time on your hands; lol! j/k j/k (kinda).
I should get to know you better before teasing. You have some interesting comments.
My brother is Thomas, or Tom, or Tommy. With our last name, back in the day his endearing nickname was “Tommy Tuba!” I dearly love my little bro! <3
Buenos noches, mi nuevo amigo, mio!
Miguelito
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Miguelito! (my middle name is Miguel/Michael) Thanks, one spends time on the things he likes right?
I stumbled on this by “accident”, how else? I was doing a quick birthday video for my niece, and to quickly double track the guitar and make it sound bigger, I did this (duplicated and flipped it) and then heard it on the phone and there was no guitar! That was a few years ago, but it stayed with me until I thought of something to make use of it.
Hence, yes, I’m a nerd, can’t hide it. I run servers for private community websites, so can’t escape it either!
Thanks,
Tomás
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Ha ha, Tomas Miguel! Nothing wrong with being a nerd, mi amigo mio. Ha ha, if you look at my photo, there is no ito in my Miguel. Mi llamo es Michael Edwin. Michael = Miguel, pero what es Edwin? Edward = Eduardo, pero what es Edwin?
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Miguelito, tocayo…
Edwin = Edwin, no complications there. Though it is a “new” addition to the list of accepted names. Yes, in Argentina you must have your kids names from a list, no deviation. When I was in school the letter “w” was not part of the Spanish alphabet, if you can believe that. Now it is, and they’ve removed the “Ch” which used to be a Spanish letter. Crazy world…
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Impressive Tomas. Thanks
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Thanks Jung!
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Wow, Tomas, you really took me back with your explanation of how you reversed a cassette tape. I did it in a more painstaking fashion which I discovered by accident when a few inches of a tape I was listening to somehow twisted over so that I heard a few seconds of backwards music from the other side. So I reversed the entire tape by rewinding it all the way to the beginning, manually twisting the lead over, and carefully propagating the twist all the way to the other end.
It was a delicate process: I stuck a ball point pen through the right hole in the cassette and rotated it counterclockwise to advance the tape, and carefully monitored the twist on the bottom side to make sure it didn’t untwist. Sometimes this required me to get my fingers involved, which locally degraded the sound quality. The whole process took longer than the normal run time of the tape, but it was worth it to have an album that no one else had.
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David, I remember doing that as well. We had some pencils that were hexagonal and fitted the cassettes perfectly, I’d twirl that thing around!
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Yes, the pens I used were also hexagonal, and the “gears” meshed as if the pen were designed with that very purpose in mind. I even used to race the pen against my tape recorder to see if I could rewind a tape faster than the machine, but my arm always tired out too quickly.
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Download a free copy of Audacity and play the song in reverse using that software and you’ll hear the “secret message”.
Stay Groovy,
Rich
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Thanks Richard. Will check out Audacity.
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Unfortunately I can’t download Audacity as it isn’t supported on MacOS.
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I think Garage Band has that functionality.
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Thanks for this Tomás. However, I am not a musician and never having used Garage Band before, I wouldn’t know where to find the information.
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I’m sure there’s another thread about this somewhere. Someone posted the backwards track on YouTube and it was quite easy to hear the hidden message.
Cheers, Darryl.
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Lol… Because you were discussing cassette tapes here…. It reminded of how my fave Canadian Rock band just released new stuff… And I believe it’s possibly going to be available as well on…. Cassette Tape… I’ve seen a photo of the Cassette Tape format of it… I’ve not seen any cassette tapes in about 15-25 yrs… The Return of Cassette Tapes perhaps?!… I would love to have a cassette tape keepsake of an MLT album
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