A bipartisan panel of digital sound experts has concluded that the strange noise heard when Hillary Clinton speeches are played backward is not the Devil speaking.
However, the nine-member panel could not agree on what the noise might be. Their explanations range from the whining sound that rock star George Michaels makes when smoking a joint to the sound that the famed Taos hum in northern New Mexico makes whenever Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld visits his vacation home in the area.
“We are in agreement that it’s not the Devil speaking, but we are still searching for a plausible explanation that a majority of the panel’s members could embrace,” said Alfonso Ettiturgeron, a professor of computer science at North Central Cincinnati University and a digital sound expert.
The controversy began last summer after Clinton, a Democratic senator from New York who is expected to run for president in 2008, released the CD “Hillary Clinton’s Speeches Played Backwards.” Every speech had a normal “forward” digital file in which the Senator was speaking in her familiar, if somewhat irritating, style. But there was also a “backward” digital file for each speech.
Many conservative commentators applauded Senator Clinton’s decision to release the backward files, saying that for the first time they could understand what she was actually saying once they heard the backward versions of her speeches.
Soon enough, however, a number of conservative evangelical Christians began reporting that their analysis of the backward speeches had detected the Devil speaking. These allegations lead to creation of the bipartisan panel of digital sound experts.
Various evangelicals provided panel members with recordings of the Devil speaking. The digital signatures of the Devil speech were compared to the backward Clinton speeches. No match was found.
“I’m quite willing to concede that the experts didn’t make a match,” said Rev. Dolan Pettigrew of the Dothan, Alabama Thirty-Second Street Evangelical Baptist Revival. “But you must keep in mind that the Devil is a clever fellow and changes his speech patterns all the time. I’ve personally heard the Devil many times, and I say I can hear him in those Clinton speeches, in the cadence of the backward words, if nothing else.”
Rev. Dolan said he had spoken to several other evangelical ministers around the country about funding a program in which recording engineers equipped with digital equipment would attend revivals around the country and attempt to catch devil voices for comparison with the Clinton backward speeches.
“The Devil is frequently present at revivals” Dolan said. “With enough recording engineers out there, it’s just a matter of time until we get a match of a Devil voice with one of the senator’s backward speeches.”