Time Travelling Song Lyrics

Mark Honeychurch - 15 April 2024

The NZ Skeptics were messaged last week by someone (no name given) who thinks they’ve found a paranormal event - a message in a piece of music from 1995 that predicted the 7.5 earthquake on New Year’s Day this year in Noto, Japan:

I have found something some may call “paranormal,” though I do believe it can be explained scientifically. A song from 1995, Tosh (Shriekbackwash), contains dialog including the words “7.6,” “Noto” and “New Year 24” which is especially odd because there was indeed a 7.6 earthquake on the Noto Peninsula on New Year’s.

In the above link I have transcribed most of the words. I hope you will find this phenomenon to be thought-provoking. Most interested to read any feedback from you.

Looking at the video description, it appears that this person possibly thinks they caused this prediction to happen, by sending the details back into the past - saying “I was actively trying to send this information”:

In 1995, a song contained references to an earthquake with the words “7.6,” “Noto” and “New Year 24”

(I was actively trying to send this information.)

Tosh (Shriekbackwash) · Fluke

Tosh

℗ 1995 Virgin Records Limited

Producer: Fluke

Studio Personnel, Remixer, Associated Performer, Music Production: Shriekback

Composer: Jonathan Fugler

Composer: Michael Bryant

Composer: Michael Tournier

#Lyrics provided on 2024-03-30

#london #90smusic

Now, at first glance you might think that figuring out the veracity of this claim would be easy, if indeed it’s worth spending any time on at all. Just get a copy of the lyrics to the song, and then check for the presence of these three key words/phrases. Then, later on, we can figure out whether these words are in context for the song, whether there are other indicators within the song’s audio of the knowledge of future events, etc.

We can find the lyrics online pretty easily, but this gives us some text that doesn’t match what we’re looking for; the lyrics look like this:

Super human fly, super sensitized

Super this and that, super value pack

Super grass for gain, super power games

Super secret spy, under supervised

On a super stage, Super market chains

Super tanker spill, pinpoint super kill

Super info fact, super computer hack

Super master plan, cream of superman

…

And so it goes on, with lots of lines mentioning “super” this or “super” that, but no mention of the words we’re looking for. And there’s a good reason for this. The original version of the song, on the album Oto, is substantially different to this remixed version.

Shriekback, who created the “Shriekbackwash” mix of this track, is a UK band who appear to have had a spotty history (breaking up in the late ’80s and then re-forming in the ’90s, and never quite managing a top 40 hit), and who provided a remix of Fluke’s track Tosh for its CD2 single release (back in the ’90s, artists often used to release singles with more than one CD version - and for electronic artists, one of those CDs would often contain remixes by other bands/artists of the track, rather than additional tracks that didn’t end up on the album). Here’s the best image I could find of this particular release’s CD insert (courtesy of eBay):

And here’s a link to the MusicBrainz listing for this CD (MusicBrainz is great as a trustworthy source of music information - kind of like the Wikipedia, or more likely the WikiData, of music):

I had a listen to the video we were given, and watched the lyrics at the bottom of the screen, and although many of them seemed to line up fairly well, there were some places where it seemed words were transcribed wrong, or several words in a row were missing. And the three sections we were supposed to be focusing on, the words “7.6” (at 0:14), “Noto” (at 0:50) and “New Year 24” (at 3:00).

I wanted to make sure I could get my hands on an independent copy, just in case the version we were given on YouTube had been doctored in any way. So, I checked my local Plex server (where I keep all my legally owned media files), to see which of Fluke’s albums I own. I have a copy of the original on the album Oto, as well as two remix copies on Fluke’s remix albums “Progressive History X” and Progressive History XXX” - but sadly neither of these are the Shriekback mix:

So, it’s off to YouTube to get the best copy I could find - which was uploaded back in May 2010 and seemed legitimate:

On a Linux machine, I can download and use a recent fork of the popular script YouTube Downloader, called yt-dlp, to get the audio from this video, and convert it dynamically to MP3, all in one command:

yt-dlp -x —audio-format mp3 —audio-quality 0 DITwK1U2WWc

This gave me an MP3 file that I could can load into Audacity, a popular Open Source audio editor:

We’re mainly interested in the first section on the left, which has the first two of the voice clips we’re looking for, so we can keep just that part and amplify it (as the track starts relatively quietly):

I first saved this section of audio and tried a couple of AI tools that were meant to be able to isolate vocals.

The first found almost nothing for the vocal track, and the second found some tiny snippets of vocals, but many of them contained loud non-vocal audio as well, making them even harder to discern words from than the original. So, it’s back to Audacity to see how well we can isolate the voice part of this piece of music.

The voice at the beginning of this track sounds like it’s most likely a phone call, as it sounds “squashed” and a bit tinny. If we look at Wikipedia, we can see that the frequencies traditionally used in phone calls for voice calls range from 300Hz to 3,000Hz or 3,400Hz - known as Narrowband compression. This is just a fraction of the frequency range of human voices, from ~50Hz to ~8,000Hz - but is wide enough for people to be intelligible over a phone call. Interestingly, of this frequency range, our voices have a fundamental frequency of between roughly 100Hz and 250Hz, and harmonics fill out the rest.

Knowing this, we can try to use Audacity’s “Vocal Reduction and Isolation” feature to filter just the voice part of this audio sample as much as we can:

After applying this filter and re-amplifying the audio, I still couldn’t make sense of what was being said. I tried with a variety of low and high frequency cutoffs, and different filter strengths, but each time, despite me wanting really hard to hear what was being said, I couldn’t make sense of any of it.

I had a thought that I should go back to the video we were supplied that had the handy subtitles, and line those up with my own version of the audio, to help me figure out what was being said. And that’s when it suddenly hit me.

I was reminded of the article I’d written last year about backmasking - hidden messages inside music. There was a panic in the 1980s about hidden satanic messages that turned out to be, in the main, nothing more than scaremongering. These supposed hidden messages were possible to discern if you had the text of what you were meant to be hearing in front of you, but impossible to figure out if you were asked to write down the message without being prompted with someone else’s idea of what was being said. It turns out that most of this phenomenon consisted of nothing more than suggestibility, with over-eager Christians in the US on a witch-hunt for evil messages in rock and roll music that were corrupting the youth and turning them to the dark side.

My revelation was that this was probably exactly what was going on here, with this person’s attempt to make sense of the hard to discern audio at the beginning of this piece of music he seems to have been obsessing over. So I went back to the original video and tried to listen really carefully to the audio sample we were given, the one that we were sent as proof of time travelling song lyrics. And, the more I actually listened to the sounds, the more it was obvious that this person’s subtitles were guiding me into thinking that any of the words were clearly discernible, where in reality all of it is damn near impossible to reliably make sense of.

At this point I realised that there was no point continuing. Whether I would be able to clean up this music track enough to be able to discern what was being said in the telephone conversation didn’t really matter. The person who wrote the subtitles for the video hadn’t been able to do this either, and instead he had just written words that he guessed were being said - and those words supported his hypothesis that he had beamed a message back in time to 1995, and had them embedded in an obscure remix of a song that had barely made the top 40 in the UK. By trusting his interpretation of what was being said at all, I was being led down the garden path. And the places in the audio where I could hear that his transcription was definitely wrong were a strong hint that he wasn’t actually able to hear the words clearly at all, and that the parts that seemed right to me could just as easily be wrong as well - they were just wrong in a way that felt plausible enough to me that I’d been duped by them.

Reading through all of the transcribed text, there was no obvious theme or consistency to the words. If this really was a telephone conversation that had been placed into the recording, according to this random internet person’s translation of it, it wasn’t one that made any sense at all. I’ve typed out all of the text from the three background audio sections, skipping the actual song lyrics:

If this little nonsense makes sense…

No. 7.6, and I’m - and I’m daft

Of its existence, (I feel) nothing, not a fear

Nonsense, dumb daft, that’s right, that.

There’s something to say to the people

of that time to come

Except for… a fact about–

“Fransisco” in cipher

its lights like a starling

The 901 says Stand Clear. Off.

Are you satisfied?

A stupid suggestion, but I’m trying to…

And “tō”: Noto, like L–

And it wasn’t?

It’s beautiful

This is London.

Yes, standby.

Nothing in coordinates.

L’s daft.

Not too sure.

He says North.

_Happy New Year 24

Is it?

“Happy New Year”‘s Stupid!

Is it?

Come on, drink it in!

Alesdrunk!

(It’s stupid for HIM)

New Years’ Stupid!

Drink it in!_

You don’t really need to know…

my name, praytell…

It will not help the wind.

When you find that I am from the–

“The future?”

I don’t think that’s important now.

Reading the content of this text, and listening to how wildly sometimes the voices in the track audibly differ from what’s been written as a transcription, it’s obvious that this is nothing more than someone’s over-zealous obsession with the idea of time travel. I’m glad I looked into it, rather than just dismissing it out of hand. But I’m also glad I saw it for what it was before I wasted too much time delving into the technical side of things, and that I quickly gave up chasing that elusive filtered audio recording that might successfully isolate the voice in the background and allow me to discern what was actually being said. I didn’t actually need this holy grail to be convinced that the claim was nonsense. I had been sent on a fool’s errand, but thankfully not for too long.