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Electronic voice phenomena (EVP) are anomalous voices, or voice-like sounds, captured on electronic media. They been found in every form of technology capable of recording voice, from the early wax recorders to modern cell phones and computers. Researchers have also recorded EVP in acoustically isolated laboratories specifically sealed to prevent interference from external radio sources. EVP are normally short, comprising single "words" or "phrases", although occasionally longer segments of "language" have been recorded. Some EVP are thought to be polyglot, with multiple languages used in the same sentence.

Some researchers have claimed the "voices" are paranormal in origin and have offered various explanations as to their source; most commonly that the sounds are the voices of discarnate entities such as spirits, which cannot be heard by the human ear, but which can be picked up through electronic equipment. Critics however argue that such recordings likely have more prosaic origins: including interference from nearby items that emit noise on low frequencies, such as CB radios or through cross modulation, which are interpreted as being voices due to pareidolia, the human propensity to perceive familiar patterns (e.g. human speech) in situations where such patterns do not exist.

History

Attempts to contact the dead have persisted through the ages, but interest in using technology to speak with the deceased arose during the early 20th century. In the 1920s, the American inventor Thomas Edison told a B.F. Forbes; a reporter with Scientific American, that he was working on creating a machine that could contact the dead. However, a few years later, Edison admitted that he been making a joke at the reporter's expense.

However, the tall tale spread widely through a growing media circuit whose audience was eager for paranormal news, and Edison's fiction has today arguably achieved the status of an urban legend.

In 1901, while studying shamanic practices of a remote Siberian tribe, anthropologist Waldemar Bogoras captured disembodied voices heard during a shaman's ritual. While recording the shaman beating his drum while in a trance-like state, Borogas heard many voices from around the room speaking both Russian and English.

In 1933, four parapsychologists and two electrical engineers recorded a public seance in the New York studio of the Decca. The participants heard many paranormal voices, and the engineers were said to have discovered that the voices occasionally broadcast beyond normal human speaking range. The test results are kept within the files of the American Society for Psychic Research (ASPR).

The 1930's also spawned several independent EVP researchers who claimed to achieve good results from phonograph recordings, including Attila von Szalay, an American photographer. In the mid 1950s von Szalay was joined by Raymond Bayless in his research; according to the ASPR's journal, their results were good.

In 1959, Friedrich Jürgenson, who some refer to as the father of EVP, after recording birdsong on his tape-recorder, heard on playback what seemed to be a human voice. Jürgenson, a film producer, made subsequent recordings that he said contained messages from his dead mother. This began his lifelong involvement with the taped phenomena, which attracted the interest of Jungian psychologist Konstantin Raudive. Raudive became deeply involved in attempts to capture spirit voices on recordings, so much so that these types of recordings became known as "Raudive voices."

It is significant that Jürgenson'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 Bruno Heim presented Jürgenson to the pope for investiture as Commander of the Order of St. Gregory for his work.

In 1971 Raudive and other engineers 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, when played more than 200 other voices can be heard. Raudive's book Breakthrough was also published in 1971.

Since Jürgenson's report, thousands of people worldwide 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.

Proponents

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.

These "other types" of entities are often described as being either benevolent or trickster-type beings. Many researchers have found that those trickster-type entities often 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 the individual is 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. Often 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.

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 the 1970s 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 ambiance 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.

Studies

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".

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.

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):

1. "The voice entities speak very rapidly, in a mixture of languages, sometimes as many as five or six in one sentence."
2. "They speak in a definite rhythm, which seems forced on them."
3. "The rhythmic mode imposes a shortened, telegram-style phrase or sentence."
4. 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."

References

1. "EVP". Skepditic's Dictionary. Retrieved 2006-12-01. {{cite web}}: Cite has empty unknown parameter: |coauthors= (help)
2. "Don't believe everything you read in a textbook!". Edison National Historic Site. National Parks Service. 2004-11-05. Retrieved 2006-12-01. {{cite web}}: Cite has empty unknown parameter: |coauthors= (help)
3. Swenson, Alex. "Waldemar Bogoras (Biography of)". Minnesota State University, Mankato. Retrieved 2006-12-01. {{cite web}}: Cite has empty unknown parameter: |coauthors= (help)
4. Alcock, James E, PhD. "Electronic Voice Phenomena: Voices of the Dead?". CSICOP. Retrieved 2006-12-01. {{cite web}}: Cite has empty unknown parameter: |coauthors= (help)CS1 maint: multiple names: authors list (link)
5. "PK-EVP Experiment". Next Step Research. Retrieved 2006-12-01. {{cite web}}: Cite has empty unknown parameter: |coauthors= (help)

Further reading

• Voices of Eternity, by Sarah Estep, Fawcett 1988
• EVP, Cinderella Science, by Gerry Connelly, Domra Pub. 2001
• There is No Death, by Tom & Lisa Butler, AA-EVP Pub. 2003
• Roads to Eternity, by Sarah Este, Fawcett 2005

See also

• Electronic voice phenomenon in fiction
• Backward message
• Ghost hunting
• Reverse speech
• Pareidolia

External links

• The American Association of Electronic Voice Phenomena
• "White Noise" - on the The Atlantic Paranormal Society (TAPS) website.
• Stephen Wagner Talks about EVP on Associated Content
• Committee for the Scientific Investigation of Claims of the Paranormal
• EVP Online Resource, Founded by TAPS's Bill Lonero
• Overview of EVP in Fortean Times by Judith Chisholm
• The official website of the G.I.S. - Ghost Investigators Society
• EVP: Beyond White Noise

na] - Co-Directors: Rev. Tom & Rev. Alisa Butler (NSAC); consultants for movie, "White Noise"

• EVP in the Skeptic's Dictionary
• Raymond Cass - UK Pioneer of EVP research
• EVPs at Ufopsi

• Spirituality
• Recording
• Ghosts