EVP Electronic Voice Phenomenon
Electronic voice phenomena (EVP) is the alleged communication by spirits through radios, tape recorders, or other electronic audio devices. EVP proponents argue that the alleged voices are inexplicable by conventional science. Skeptics say there are prosaic explanations for the phenomenon that do not require communication from ghosts, spirits, or other paranormal sources
Speculation about EVP can be traced back to the 1920s. In a Scientific American interview, Thomas Edison was quizzed on his views regarding contacting the dead. Edison said that it might be "possible to construct an apparatus which will be so delicate that if there are personalities in another existence or sphere who wish to get in touch with us in this existence or sphere, this apparatus will at least give them a better opportunity to express themselves than the tilting tables and raps and ouija boards and mediums and the other crude methods now purported to be the only means of communication." There is no indication that Edison designed or tried to construct such a device (though his speculations on the subject feature prominently in Tim Powers' novel Expiration Date).
The basic assumption behind EVP belief is that spirits or other entities may find it easier to manipulate random noise than to move solid physical objects, speak through mediums, or to use other means of communication. Critics say that the use of electronic communication devices has opened up entirely new methods for self-deception and for charlatans to simulate contact with their clients' dead friends and loved ones. In most cases, they say, no fraud is needed since it is so easy for people to fool themselves when listening to or looking at random noise.[2] The human mind readily perceives meaningful patterns in random sounds or images that have no such patterns. Although these illusions called apophenia are pronounced in people who psychosis, they are also common in mentally healthy people. The common Rorschach inkblot psychological test makes use of people's ability to perceive meaning in completely meaningless patterns.
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History
In 1901 a Russian American by the name of Waldemar Bogoras was an ethnologist studying the shaman of a remote Siberian tribe. Whilst recording the shaman beating his drum and entering a trance-like state many voices, coming from all around the room speaking in Russian and English, were captured on his crude phonograph. And also, from the very early 1900`s Marconi, Tesla and Edison spent the last years of their lives trying to develop devices for communicating with spirit. It is known that Edison had taken out some patents on various machines for communicating with the dead. Also, in 1967, in a post-mortem message, he made suggestions how to modify TV sets and to tune them to 740 megahertz for the express purpose of receiving paranormal effects.
In 1933 there was a public demonstration of a seance in the New York studio of the World Broadcasting Company (that later became Decca). Four eminent parapsychologists and two reputable electrical engineers, under rigidly controlled test conditions, were shocked to hear many paranormal voices speaking to them. These entities even moved their voice levels high up into cycles which were way beyond the range of any human being, between 3 - 5,000 cycles. (This is incorrect. Healthy, young people hear in the range 20 - 20,000 Hertz) The results of this test were kept within the files of the ASPR (American Society for Psychicl Research).
A Californian, Attila von Szalay, in 1936, started capturing paranormal voices on phonograph records and the in the mid 1950`s he was joined by Raymond Bayless. Together they acquired many evidential EVP on their new tape recorders and they published their findings in the Journal of the ASPR.
About this time also, dozens of reports of intrusive voices of unknown origin from military and civilian installations world-wide were gathered together and put in the book by John Keel called OUR HAUNTED PLANET.
A few years later in 1959, the so-called father of EVP, Friedrich Juergenson, a Russian born Swedish film producer, after recording birdsong on his tape-recorder, heard on playback what appeared to be a human voice. Subsequent recordings contained a message which seemed to be coming from his dead mother. This was the beginning of his lifelong involvement with the taped phenomena that became known as the RAUDIVE voices. He mentions his experiences in a book which made a deep impression on the Latvian psychologist Dr. Konstantin Raudive.
It is significant that Juergenson`s work on the taped voices was made known to the Vatican in 1960 and his suggestion that these recordings are voices from the dead was sympathetically considered. In 1973, Archbishop Dr. Bruno Heim presented Juergenson to the Pope for investiture as Commander of the Order of St Gregory for his work.
Since Jurgenson's report, thousands of people all over the world have attempted to replicate his experiments, and many have claimed success. Many people do not use specialized equipment to capture the voices, only a microphone and a means of recording, such as a tape/minidisc/CD recorder or a computer. Patience is required however, because many claim that it can take months of diligent recording before voices appear. Proponents recommend the use of headphones, because the voices are often faint, and a computer for processing the recordings is very helpful.[citation needed]
In 1971 Raudive, along with the engineers of Pye Records conducted a controlled experiment in a special sound laboratory that blocked out all external radio and TV signals. Raudive`s voice was taped speaking into a microphone for 18 minutes and no other sounds were made or heard. However, on re-play over 200 extra voices were received.
1971 was the year that Raudive`s book, BREAKTHROUGH, was published by Colin Smythe, in English and it is the book by which most EVP researchers of that day can pinpoint their entry into the field.
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Instrumental transcommunication
EVP is a subcategory of Instrumental transcommunication (ITC), which means the use of the tape recorder, video recorder, TV, radio, computer, telephone and other technical devices for the express purpose of getting meaningful information from the quantum realm in such forms as voices, images and text. In the case of telephones, many people report having received phone calls by someone claiming to be a deceased relative or a colleague. The voices can also manifest via the white noise between untuned stations on a radio.[citation needed]
Some of the most remarkable cases involve television and computers; a distorted image of a dead person's face will sometimes appear on a television screen, and some images even appear as a clear "full body" snapshot of the deceased individual, often standing in the foreground of a beautiful and peaceful looking backdrop. In some of these cases, the spirit will use the television to say that the scene behind them is an actual view of the "astral world", and that the background scene is depicted in order to reassure the living that their deceased loved ones are in a safe and "wonderful" place.[citation needed]
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Proponents
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Proponents theory
Spiritualists and those EVP organizations whose directors are members of the Spiritualist church e.g AA-EVP believe that they are in contact with human spirits who are said to have survived the deaths of their physical bodies, but are still able to communicate with the living. Most long-time researchers in this field will also agree that they have been in contact, at one time or another, with various astral entities who claim to have never incarnated as humans on the earthly plane. There are also those who claim to have been in contact with entities who have identified themselves as nature energies or as beings from "other worlds" (extraterrestrials), while some suggest that the sounds and images seen and heard on electronic equipment might be placed there by living human beings via a kind of psychokinesis. [citation needed]
These "other types" of entities are oftentimes described as being either benevolent or trickster-type beings. Many reseachers have found that those trickster-type entities oftentimes seem to "evolve" into more benevolent-like personalities as time goes by. Nevertheless, proponents contend that EVP experimenters must develop a degree of discernment regarding all information recovered via EVP. Fortunately, proponents insist, the longer one engages in such experimentation, the better they are at discerning whom and where their information is coming from; this is usually based on the actual "content" of the information communicated to them. Proponents claim that EVP is the occurrence of sounds or voices on an audio recording which were not produced by known means. [citation needed] Oftentimes these sounds or voices were not heard by the unaided physical ear of the recorder during their EVP recording session. To some, this suggests the possibility that the voices or sounds were produced directly on the recording device via psychokinesis, or were audible outside the range of human hearing, possibly produced by psychokinetic manipulation of sound waves. [1]
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Skeptics
Those who are skeptical of paranormal phenomena insist that there are more plausible explanations for EVP. The Skeptic's Dictionary summarises a number of common observations on the subject: "While it is impossible to prove that all EVPs are due to natural phenomena, skeptics maintain that they are probably due to such things as interference from a nearby CB operator or cross modulation. The phenomena has been recorded in Faraday cages since 1970`s at Pye Electronics in the UK. Some of the 'voices' are most likely people creating meaning out of random noise, a kind of auditory pareidolia or apophenia. Now that the phenomenon has a number of devoted followers some hoaxers have probably entered the fray."
Another possible explanation is that people may have used old tapes for EVP sessions, and that the voices they hear come from a previous recording "bleeding through". There are several cases of people being spooked by what turned out to be voices from a radio program or a nearby baby monitor, suggesting that many unexplained voice phenomenon could have equally mundane origins. When using language, humans are constantly sorting out noise, recognizing speech patterns and so on, all unconsciously.
This training can also make us pick up words that are not even there, just as it can make people hear something other than what was said. Digital audio recording devices may also be chosen on the basis of a poor Signal-to-noise ratio, believing that they are more "sensitive" to "life energies". Poor quality A/D and DACs on cheaper digital recorders create artifacts not present from the ambience being recorded. For digital voice recorders, the audio compression is also tuned to record only to the frequency bands optimal for properly recognizing the human voice, all other bands are discarded. Any static will therefore not be broad-spectrum and may be confused with garbled speech.
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Recording EVP
The quality, volume and durations of recordings are said to be increased by using a sound source placed within audible distance of the microphone during recording. Typically this would be a radio tuned to between stations so only white noise is audible; the theory being that this provides an acoustic basis for the voices to be constructed from, similar to vocoder technology.[citation needed]
This need for background noise fits the alternative explanation that the white noise provides random sounds that may be interpreted as voices by people who expect or want to hear voices. This explanation is consistent with the theory that the entire "phenomenon" is an example of pareidolia, in which a vague or random stimulus is mistakenly perceived as recognizable (see the skeptic section).
Voices are said to be known for being rapid, faint, and often spoken in grammatically unusual and simplified language—or even multiple languages during the same sentence. The interpretation of such recordings is often highly subjective and may differ from listener to listener; some listeners may hear nothing at all, while others report hearing specific phrases or sentences.[citation needed]
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Studies
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Raudive voices
Taking their inspiration from Jürgenson, EVP phenomena were investigated by the German parapsychologist Hans Bender and by the Latvian psychologist Konstantin Raudive. Following the publication of Raudive's book on his research (Breakthrough, 1971) these phenomena are now often referred to as "Raudive Voices".
Professor Bender, notable parapsychologist from the University of Freiburg, eventually wrote in his conclusion that these voices were `susceptible to a paranormal interpretation`.
In a recent post-mortem message to a German researcher he had this to say: `Free yourself from the rigid conduct of tradition and open yourself to the new forms of probability. Your system of reality is one of countless others and all are happening at the same time. The frequency of our own reality is so short that it cannot be perceived by you`.
The only other scientist of note ever to have personally studied EVP and other forms of ITC for many, many years is Professor Ernst Senkowski, a physicist with a degree on electron acceleration. He came to the conclusion that the phenomena strongly upheld the Spiritualistic hypothesis that the so-called dead are alive and that they have `found new ways of reaching us`.
Dr Konstantin Raudive (1906-1974), a student of Carl Jung, was a psychologist who taught at the University of Uppsala in Sweden. He was preoccupied with parapsychological interests all his life (especially with the possibility of life after death), and he kept in close contact with leading British psychical researchers.[citation needed]
In 1964, Raudive read Jürgenson's book, Voices from Space, and was so impressed by it that he arranged to meet Jürgenson in 1965. He then worked with Jürgenson to make some EVP recordings, but their first efforts bore little fruit, although they believed that they could hear very weak, muddled voices. However, one night, as he listened to one recording, he clearly heard a number of voices. When he played the tape over and over, he came to understand all of them, some of which were in German, some in Latvian, some in French. The last voice on the tape, a woman's voice, said "Va dormir, Margarete" ("Go to sleep, Margaret").
Raudive later wrote (in his book Breakthrough): "These words made a deep impression on me, as Margarete Petrautzki had died recently, and her illness and death had greatly affected me." Amazed by this, he started researching such voices on his own and spent much of the last ten years of his life exploring electronic voice phenomena. With the help of various electronics experts he recorded over 100,000 audiotapes, most of which were made under what he described as "strict laboratory conditions." He collaborated at times with Bender. Over 400 people were involved in his research, and all apparently heard the voices. This culminated in the 1971 publication of his book Breakthrough, mentioned above.
Raudive developed several different approaches to recording EVP, and he referred to:
Microphone voices: one simply leaves the tape recorder running, with no one talking; he indicated that one can even disconnect the microphone.
Radio voices: one records the white noise from a radio that is not tuned to any station.
Diode voices: one records from what is essentially a crystal set not tuned to a station.
Raudive delineated a number of characteristics of the voices, (as laid out in Breakthrough):
"The voice entities speak very rapidly, in a mixture of languages, sometimes as many as five or six in one sentence."
"They speak in a definite rhythm, which seems forced on them."
"The rhythmic mode imposes a shortened, telegram-style phrase or sentence."
Probably because of this, "... grammatical rules are frequently abandoned and neologisms abound."
In a post-mortem message in 1988 Raudive stated:
"Man as a partially space-timeless entity belongs to many different fields and dimensions."
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Spiricom
From the mid-1960s to the early-1980s, research was conducted by the "Metascience Foundation", formerly based in Franklin, North Carolina, on the development of a system of communication with the dead. Two inventors, George W. Meek and William J. O'Neil, supposedly developed a machine containing sophisticated audio electronics that allowed actual two-way conversation with the afterlife. They called it Spiricom. Unlike EVP, where an investigator has to wait and playback a recording to hear disembodied voices, the Spiricom device allowed real-time two-way communication (or "Direct Voice") from beyond the grave. The project was officially defined as "An electromagnetic-etheric systems approach to communications with other levels of human consciousness".[citation needed]
At least five Spiricom machines were said to have been constructed, (named the Mark I through Mark V respectively), each a major improvement over the other previous design. The first systems worked by using a high-frequency white noise generator that would provide a "carrier" wave for a ghost's actual voice. The theory was, if a ghost could record itself to magnetic media such as video cassette or audio tape via manipulating electromagnetic frequencies, the entity could manipulate the electromagnetic fields produced by the Spiricom machine and create a synthetic voice over a speaker through the oscillator of the noise generator.[citation needed]
Experiments began in Philadelphia sometime in 1972. Experimenters claimed that a psychic medium contacted a spirit and "guided" it to the test device. Initially, the Mark I did not produce communication and simply made unexplained buzzing and popping noises, however Meek believed this was an entity trying to communicate. The researchers claimed to take into account possible interference from a nearby airport control tower and devised better shielding for the device.[citation needed]
In 1974, the Mark II was made and was allegedly much more successful. The first somewhat coherent voices were heard although they were very difficult to understand. From the parts of the audio that were comprehensible, the entity claimed the machine was difficult to use.[citation needed]
It wasn't until 1977 when the Spiricom Mark III and Mark IV had been built and produced a more stable sound output with microwave emitters and better shielding that more meaningful communication was perceived.[citation needed]
Though various question and answer sessions with at least three separate entities, (one of which claimed to have died in 1830), the alleged beings supposedly described the events of their death and what it was like on the "other side", saying it was just another level of human consciousness. They supposedly mentioned there are several levels in fact and they supposedly exist among them as mental energy without a physical body. They claim to "see" psychics and the Spiricom device itself as pathways of "light" that they can channel through to the material world and make communication.[citation needed]
Proponents insist that the best reported contact was on April 16, 1980. Meeks and O'Neil claimed they were able to talk to a very clear voice of a deceased physicist, Dr. George Jeffries Mueller, who died on May 31, 1967 from a heart condition. Mueller claimed he was once an associate professor of engineering and mathematics at Orange Coast College, in Costa Mesa, California, and had also worked for at time with NASA. Mueller's voice sounded like a robot, buzzing through hissing background noise.[citation needed]
Meeks and O'Neil claim to have spent months recording many hours of audio with Mueller's spirit, who even helped them "tune him in" better and advised them of how to improve the Spricom device. Supposedly, other entities also tried to talk through the machine, however these communications did not last as long as Mueller's or were very incomprehensible. Some, according to Mueller, were unable to use the device at all. After some time, communication with Mueller was said to become less frequent. Sometimes the spirit would not speak for weeks, and eventually, communication with him ended completely. Spiricom research ended in early 1982.[citation needed]
Spiricom was hardly publicized, if at all, and most reports on the subject have fallen into pseudoscience and obscurity. Many skeptics believe the Spricom experiment is a complete fraud. A few amateur audio enthusiasts have tried to recreate the experiments and claim various degrees of success.[citation needed]
The Spiricom audio tapes of Dr. Mueller have been played on Art Bell's "Coast to Coast AM" radio program. Some of these audio clips can be downloaded from this website: Spiricom MP3's. The Spiricom reports are available for free download from this website: Spiricom Device, including the plans and research papers with technical instructions and diagrams on how to build your own Spiricom device. Meeks and O'Neil patented the device, but they allow anyone to make their own, "royalty free", and conduct further research and development, so long as that person agrees never to sell the research for profit.