A New Hobby?
There is a scene from the film Top Secret where it is clear that it was choreographed backwords, filmed, and played in reverse, giving a very cool effect. But the dialogue was also backwards, and subtitles were provided. Reminded of this scene for no reason, I've been trying to duplicate reversed speech, such that when I play a recording backwards, it sounds normal. This endevor has made me (even more) aware of English's rich allophony, and many nuances of phonetic mechanics. Currently I sound like a robot, but I'll keep practicing. From my simple experiments it seems that this trick is easy for Japanese, not too bad for Spanish or even Chinese, but very difficult for English. I'd be interested if anyone is (incidentally) very good at this...
Well anyway, after we all get good at this new hobby, then we can start to work on my challenge. Finding phrases whose forward and backwards rendition are both understandable in a single language. For example 'rocks' and 'scar' are pretty close, despite the 'r' allophony (yeah I never noticed either until now). But hopefully I can find longer phrases.
Eventually I'll post some recordings so you can hear exactly what I mean.
posted by James at 00:55
1 Comments:
I remember a scene in Ace Ventura where Jim Carrey is suposedly speaking English backwards, and very quickly. It didn't seem to me like the scene was shot backwards, but it would be interesting to get a hold of that scene, reverse the audio, and see how well he was actually doing. Jim Carrey may not have the phonetic knowledge to really understand the sublteties and difficulties of making it sound natural when reversed, but he is a very talented actor and may well surprise us.
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