I don't know about everyone, but when I listen to music, I don't hear a singularity.

I hear a plethora of separate voices & instruments all playing separately, which combine in mathematically harmonious combinations like many layers of silk woven over an elaborate canvas, but usually only the prime 3 are identifiable, beyond that its hard to discern one from the other, sometimes some of the components are hidden like that metal strip in paper money, and you are not usually consciously aware of how much its presence contributes.

I like to mentally try visualising the entire setup in my head and visually represent each instruments wave form ( like on a spectrogram ), which doing so, in turn enriches the perception of the sound quality.

A trick I've been trying lately is to try mentally filtering out specific instruments in the track, so that consciously there as if somebody at the mixing desk creating the track turned their volume down. Doing so uncovers interesting artefacts in some songs, Boards of Canada in particular are good example. You hear one off noises that are almost sub-audible, other songs are almost bare and naked underneath. Sometimes you'll uncover peculiar instruments you didn't notice adding to the mix. I also note stuff most other people seem not to notice.

You should familiarise yourself with what human voices sound like in reverse, as from what I've seen, most people could hear human voices played in reverse at normal volume with no accompaniment and still not recognise that's what it is.

For those of you whom have seen Celebrity Deathmatch with Ozzy Osbourne vs Rob Zombie, how many cottoned on to the fact ozzy said something backwards? Who took the time to discover that when played forwards it said ( amusingly enough ) more or less "I make love to rob nightly" ?

Now I wont argue for or against the arguments behind this term known as "backwards masking" by some, the arguments for and against are non-important, It just intrigues me every time I find somebody using it, even more so, using it in a way that's intentionally inaudible without listening hard.

Queens "Another one bites the dust" is a bit of vocal mastery on this point, and even singing it live in concert, when played back the famous phrase "its fun to smoke marijuana, marijuana, marijuana, its fun to smoke marijuana" emanates inexplicably.

Boards of Canada only have sound-bytes or 2 in reverse at the bottom of it all, but I don't mind, I still luv em. They have at least *openly* admitted to adding subconscious messages intentionally in their music! ^[1]

I myself can say I'm a bit guilty of putting obscure messages in places in my stuff. If I gave you examples then It'd be defeating the purpose of doing it .

_{1. Wikipedia:Boards Of Canada#Sublimininal Messages[1]}