With the fading piano sound is thus reversed, it slowly builds up in volume before ending suddenly, at which point Offord edited it seamlessly into the first notes of Howe's guitar introduction. The tape of this piano chord was then reversed by producer Eddy Offord and carefully edited into the track. The 'fade-in' sound is a minor chord (played on a grand piano by keyboardist Rick Wakeman) that was sounded and allowed to fade to silence. The song begins with a sound which gradually fades in, and then ends suddenly, changing abruptly into guitar music, performed by guitarist Steve Howe. The reverse tape technique became especially popular during the psychedelic music era of the mid-to-late 1960s when musicians and producers exploited a vast range of special audio effects.Īn example of the use of reverse tape effects is the song 'Roundabout' (1972) by the British progressive rock group Yes. These two trends led to tape music compositions, composed on tape using techniques including reverse tape effects. The 1950s saw two new developments in audio technology: the development of musique concrète, an avant-garde form of electronic music, which involves editing together fragments of natural and industrial sounds, and the concurrent spread of the use of tape recorders in recording studios. Reverse effects were regarded largely as a curiosity and were little used until the 1950s.

In 1878, Edison noted that, when played backwards, 'the song is still melodious in many cases, and some of the strains are sweet and novel, but altogether different from the song reproduced in the right way'. In addition to recreating recorded sounds by placing the stylus on the cylinder or disc and rotating it in the same direction as during the recording, one could hear different sounds by rotating the cylinder or disc backwards. Emile Berliner invented the familiar lateral-cut disc phonograph record in 1888. In 1877, Thomas Edison invented the phonograph, a device allowing sound to be recorded and reproduced on a rotating cylinder with a stylus (or 'needle') attached to a diaphragm mounted at the narrow end of a horn. Backmasking is a type of reverse tape effect. Reverse tape effects are special effects created by recording sound onto magnetic tape and then physically reversing the tape so that when the tape is played back, the sounds recorded on it are heard in reverse. Special effects created by playing recordings backwards

Rewind sound effect