Advanced Techniques for Mixing Subliminal Messages

By awixas January 13, 2020

In this article, I will share some of the more advanced techniques I have used over the years for making subliminal message audio tracks. Many of these I have learned from my experience in audio engineering, from other people, online sources and some were innovations I created. When you search google for ways to make subliminal messages, it seems article after article only discusses two or three methods: usually just backmasking and subaudibles. But there is so much more you could do with modern audio technology it seems we need an updated set of tools.

Remember, these are just some tools you could use, so be creative and expiriment! Always keep in mind that you want to keep your subliminals as close to conscious perception as possible without really being detectable or noticable by the listener. And remember to have fun!

Superliminals

Though technically not subliminal, superliminal messages can be some of the most powerful embeds you could use. Superliminal means above the threshold of conscious perception, which means that the listener can actually hear the message if they pay attention and know what they are looking for. But if properly blended into the audio track, they will be heard but not be noticed by the listener. These messages should be very short affirmations, often done in a whisper that blends into a sound effect such as a chime or cybol crash.

Superliminals are also well suited for audio that is meant to be played while you sleep. This is because when you are asleep, there is no need to mask a message as your conscious awareness is absent. A good way to make an overnight subliminal is to make the first hour subliminal, but start adding spoken affirmations or guided meditation audio at the superliminal level. In other words, for the superliminal part you could just record your affirmations and have them play without a need to mask the audio in any way, other than to keep it quiet enough to not wake you up.

Back-Masking

Made popular by controversial bands in the sixties and seventies, backmasking is a technique where the affirmation is recorded and then reversed before it is mixed into the audio. The idea is that your brain will pick up the phonetic sounds and tones of the words spoken in the message and make a subconsious connection to the meaning. Our minds are truly powerful computers and could actually deconstruct and reconstruct a lot more than you think. Sometimes we feel we have intuition about something, but really it is our subconsious mind making conclusions and calculations that we are not aware of on a conscious level. Well that's the idea behind backmasking audio: in other words, our mind solves the riddle and subconsiously understand the backmasked message.

Pink floyd back mask example:

Subaudible

Subaudible embeds are probably the most common type of subliminal messsages in audio tracks. This type of subliminal message is simply an amplitute sum of the original track mixed with the affirmation where the subliminal is just mixed in at a lower volume and will be masked by the louder music playing so that you don't consiously hear it. But your subconsious will pick it up. Have you ever been in a loud club with the music pumping, when all of a suddend you are compelled to turn around and look behind you... And your best friend has been right there trying to get your attention over the loud music. Well, even though you did not hear them, your subconsious mind picked up on their voice and compelled you to turn around. That is essentially the effect of subaudible subliminals. But be careful rendering or converting subaudibles because they will be lost in compression.

Altered Echos

If you are composing a subliminal song, you may be adding some sounds for musical effect. For example you might have an soundscape type song that builds on a basic droning sound. To make your music more interesting, you might add certain sound effects. Perhaps some birds chirping, or a wind chime to calm the listener. If you add a delay or echo effect to those sounds, you could take the echoes and blend in a subliminal message that echoes along with the original sound. This is an effective way of hiding a subliminal message because the listeners mind will take the first sound effect (before it echoes, and without sublims) and assume the echoes are a repeat. The listener will not notice that the echoe actually changed a bit to include an affirmation. This is technically hard to produce properly, but can be done with matching the echo frequency of both the sound effect and the subliminal embed.

Connoataion Sounds

Connotation sounds are sound effects that inspire the appropriate thoughts in the mind of the listener. For example, if the affirmation is meant to inspire you to work out more, than sounds of weights being dropped, or workout machines could be subtly used in your subliminal composition. You could actually make an entire track by mixing samples of connotation sound effects if you want, though that would be more for fun and experience than anything else. This type sublimininal embed can really help boost the strength of a subconsious messsage because the mind will be compelled on some levels to associate the sound effects with their meaning.

Threshold Band Filters

Our minds can only interperate sounds within a given range of frequencies. Some sounds are to low, and others have too high a pitch to hear, like a dog whistle. But the air is still vibrating our ear drums wether or not we hear the sound directly. Every individual has a different range that they could percieve. It is a common subliminal technique to use high band and low band filters to include messages at or near the threshold of you ability to hear. These types of messages will be lost with compression, so they are really only for lossless audio file types. It is a good idea to do and audio test and find out your range and to tell your subliminizer so they could personalize the subliminals for your ears.

Vocoders

Vocoders are often used in music to synthsize a human voice that usually ends up sounding very robotic. However, you could use a vocoder with one or more the songs audio channel as a carrier signal to modulate the amplitude of a subliminal to match the aplitude of the song as it raises and lowers throughout the composition. This technique will allow you to maintain your subaudible subliminals as close to percievable as possible without crossing the line of conscious perception threshold.

You could also use a vocoder to make your words sound like an instrument, which is a really nice effect for adding subliminals

Tempo

The tempo of music has been proven to effect the tempo of our heart rate and breathing rate. You could use this property to emotionally effect the listener in a desired way. A good idea for a subliminal mix is to have the tempo of the song decrease ever so slighty as the song plays. This will have the effect of relaxing the listener and making them more receptive to the subliminal messages.

Pitch Modulation

Pitch modulation should be used to match the tones of the subliminal to the key signature of the song that is playing. This makes the blend less jarring and turns the subliminal into part of the music rather than just being overlayed on top of the song (which will cause weird things like clipping and other audio production no-nos). It's a good idea to know some music theory and to make subliminals play in the key of the song or a related mode, or even a harmonic of the root note of the chord being played at the moment of the subliminal.

Autotune

Autotune could be used for automated pitch modulation.

Floor Noise

Floor noise is the audible background noise in a recording. It is the sum of all the noise sources and unwanted signals picked up by a mic. It usually sounds like static and you could hear it in most commercial audio recordings. Floor noise gives you a great opportunity to hide some subaudibles in a song or soundscape. Just make a seperate channel for added floor noise. You could use white noise, pink noise or brown noise generators depending on the what you feel is needed for the desired effect. If you can't decide, go with white noise. Learn more about noise.

ASMR

Now popular on youtube, ASMR or autonomous sensory meridian response is a feeling of well-being combined with a tingling sensation in the scalp and down the back of the neck, as experienced by some people in response to a specific gentle stimulus, often a particular sound. ASMR is triggered by things like whispering voices, paper tearing, and scalp massage." For certain subliminals, it's a good idea to mix in some ASMR into the song to help with the listener's relaxation.

Lyrical Matching

When the carrying music has lyrics that are sung or spoken, a great approach is to utilize those lyrics as part of your message. For example, let's say you want to add a subliminal affirmation that tells the listener to focus on their schoolwork. Let's randomly choose the song in the lion king "i just can't wait to be king" There is a lyric that goes "I'm gonna be a mighty king, so enemies beware!" well... you could use the "I'm going to be" part as a portion of your hidden affirmation, and just add "focused on my work" so the song plays: "I'm going to be [sub: focused at school] a mighty king" The result is the phrase "I'm going to be focused at school." This is obviously a contrived example just to illustrate the technique.

Segmentation

Segmentation is where you break up a subliminal message into pieces such that it is not played continuously. For example, if your message is "I will feel confident," then you could break it up to play it in segments for the listener's subconsious mind to reconstruct and 'solve' the hidden message. One way to do this is to break the message by syllables and put each one at the first beat of every musical messure. "I"... 2... 3... 4... "will"... 2... 3... 4... "feel"... 2... 3... 4... "con"... 2... 3... 4... "fi"... 2... 3... 4... "dent"... 2... 3... 4...

Anchoring

A good subliminal technique is using the Pavlovian response: Maybe there's a chime that rings in the audio track... and every time the chime rings the subliminal affirmation will be reinforced. Even more powerful is when you choose an anchoring sound that the listener is likely to hear in their daily life even after they stop listening to the subliminal. For example, if you anchor the sound of, let's say a computer mouse click to a positive affirmation, then every time they click a mouse, that affirmation will be reinforced. This get's into hypnosis techniques and will be discussed in more detail in other articles.

Dialogue Layering

In this technique, the subliminal dialog channel is layered on top of itself and shifted, or jumbled with other affirmation dialog so that the result sounds like a room full of people talking. You can't make out any specific words or phrases, but your subconsious mind could do the detective work. This is very much like the experience we all have where we are speaking to someone, but near by some other people are having a seperate conversation. What tends to happen is that your dialog will be influenced subconsciously by what you hear from the other people talking near you. It is not uncommon to start speaking about the same topic as the other people, even if you didn't notice them at all!

Sample Stretching

In this technique, the subliminal affirmations are stretched without changing pitch so that the affirmation could be smoothly heard across long long periods of time during the music. The stretch will make the words in the affirmation impossible to interperate on a conscious level, but act as another puzzle for your subconscious to figure out, which it will. You could stretch an affirmation to different lengths in multiple ways throughout the track. And you can even stretch the affirmation across the entire song. The stretched audio will make a unique sound that you could play with using pitch modulation to mix in as part of the music itself.

Binaural Affirmations

Play one affirimation in balanced to the left audio channel, and a different affirmation balanced to the right audio channel (in a stereo track). This is done so that you are getting multiple messages at the same time, but can not understand either one. You could do this with subliminal or superliminal tracks. This idea comes from hypnosis recordings where the hypnotist confuses your conscious mind with simultaneous dialog to let the affirmation sink in deeply to your subconsious.

Check back for More Techniques to come...

© 2020 subliminizers.com All Rights Reserved