Course of Empire

NEW YORK 

Giving new credence to the maxim that necessity is the mother of
invention, Justice Records president Randall Jamail and COO David
Thompson unwittingly came up with an innovation in CD recording: a
truly hidden track, accessible only by rewinding past the start of the
disc into a space otherwise reserved for nonmusical information. 

Justice created the feature - which it calls the Justice Soundboard
.... 

... The irony of Justice's patent pursuit is that another label seems
to have already come up with the Soundboard idea on an album whose
release preceded Nelson's by several months. 

Zoo Entertainment, which released "Initiation" by Dallas alternative
rock band Course of Empire, inserted a hidden track on that CD,
accessible only by rewinding past the "trunk" at the beginning 
of the disc. However, Zoo did not create a logo or file for a
patent for the process. 

"Initiation" producer David Castell says he came up with the idea when
the band presented him with material that didn't fit the album's
aesthetic , but was worth releasing anyway. 

Dating his invention to the early summer of 1993, Castell says, "There
were two pieces of music that we recorded while we were making the
album, and we just didn't have anyplace to put them. And so this idea
of hiding a song a the beginning of the CD came to me." 

But that wasn't Castell's only invention on the Course of Empire
album. He also came up with an arguably more ingenious trick : burying
a track within a track. This was accomplished by taking a recording of 
white-noise feedback, putting it in mono, and digitally cloning and 
inverting it, panning the positivetrack left and the negative 
(cloned/inverted) track right. 

Because they are digital clones of one another, the positive and
negative tracks cancel each other out when played  back in mono,
allowing an embedded track to be heard through the resulting void.
That hidden track is a hymn-like tune that stands in sharp contrast to
the cacophonous feedback segment - an order-out-of-chaos theme that
permeates the album , according to Castell. 

That particular feature has even more limitations that the
preprogram space, however. It can be accessed only by pushing the mono
button on players that have such a function, and it doesn't work
perfectly. Because CD players have error margins of up to one dB, they
don't completely cancel out the noise track, according to
Castell. Units he tested achieved cancellation rates of 89% to 99%, he
says. 

Castell notes that he was unaware of the Justice Soundboard. However,
he insists that he came up with the invention himself months before
the fall '93 Justice planning meetings for the Nelson record, at which
the idea for the Soundboard was hatched, according to Jamail. 

Castell, like other audio professionals surveyed for this story, is
skeptical about the patentability of the feature. In fact, he says it
never even occurred to him to file for a patent....