Play any track backwards

What reversing audio does

The envelope is what changes

Reversing plays the samples back to front, and the striking thing is not that the tune runs backwards but that every sound turns inside out. Real sounds start sharply and fade — a piano note, a drum, a plucked string. Reversed, they swell out of nothing and stop abruptly. That rising-then-cut shape is unlike anything acoustic, which is why reversed audio sounds otherworldly even when the source is ordinary.

The reverse-reverb swell

The best known use in music production. Reverse a vocal phrase or a cymbal, add reverb to the reversed version, then reverse the result back. The reverb now arrives before the sound instead of after it, producing the whoosh that rises into a chorus on countless records. It takes three passes and costs nothing.

Learning a part backwards

Guitarists have used this for decades. A fast run played in reverse presents the same notes in the opposite order, and phrases that had become muscle memory suddenly have to be heard again. It is also the quickest way to find out whether a solo you admire was played or edited.

Reversed speech

Speech reversed is almost never intelligible, because consonants depend on the order of their attack and decay. What survives is rhythm and pitch contour. Reversing speech is an effect, not a cipher.