Phonetic reversal

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Phonetic reversal is the process of reversing the phonemes of a word or phrase. When the reversal is identical to the original, the original (and its reversal as well, of course) is called a phonetic palindrome. Phonetic reversal is subtly distinct from backmasking, which is the reversal of recorded speech. This is because pronunciation in speech cause a reversed vowel to sound different in either direction, or differently emphasize a consonant depending on where it lies in a word, hence creating an imperfect reversal.

[edit] Examples

At one point in the 1984 American film Amadeus, lead character Wolfgang Mozart claims to Constanze Weber that "[in Salzburg] everything goes backwards." He then proceeds to deliver a series of phonetically reversed phrases, many of them vulgar, which she must guess by reversing them out loud. Interestingly, the film as well as all the reversals are in English (with one of them even commented on for its unintended similarity to the English phrase "I'm sick") yet if the events had ever actually occurred, the conversation would have been in German, with naturally different reversals altogether.
The Paul is dead urban legend became prominent when a DJ named Russ Gibb played backwards on the radio part of The Beatles' "Revolution 9", and head what sounded like "Turn me on, dead man..."^[1]
For the Radiohead song "Like Spinning Plates", released on Amnesiac, singer Thom Yorke sung the lyrics, played them backwards and learned how to sing them backwards. He recorded them backwards and reversed them for the final take of the song.
The Residents also used the same technique in the late 1970s, for the recording of the "Eskimo" dialogue in the album Eskimo.
This technique was also used for the Man from another place character in the television drama Twin Peaks. The Simpsons used the same technique to parody the Twin Peaks episode in Who Shot Mr. Burns? (Part 2).
Kate Bush used this technique in Watching You Without Me (1985) and Leave it Open (1982).
This technique was also used in 1982 by John Wright of NoMeansNo for the backing vocal on the song "Rich Guns", from their first album, "Mama".
In the early 1980s, bass player Bill Lanphier reversed a recording of the "Theme from New York, New York", which he and other musicians mimicked and recorded, and then reversed that backward recording to create a double-backward recording, in which the music is oriented correctly but which maintains the quality of a backward recording (mp3 file).
In 1999, They Might Be Giants released Long Tall Weekend, which contained a track entitled "On Earth my Nina". The song was made so that played backwards it created a completely different song with a complete set of lyrics, "Thunderbird", which came out on their later album The Spine. Also, on their song "Dinner Bell" from Apollo 18 in 1992, they used a technique similar to Radiohead's (see above) for one of the verses.
The instrumentals of Siouxsie & the Banshees' song Peek-a-Boo was produced using backmasking. They learned to play the song backwards, then reversed the track when including the vocals.