Within ghost hunting and parapsychology,
electronic voice phenomena are sounds
found on electronic recordings that are
interpreted as spirit voices that have
been either unintentionally recorded or
intentionally requested and recorded.
Parapsychologist Konstantīns Raudive,
who popularized the idea in the 1970s,
described EVP as typically brief,
usually the length of a word or short
phrase.
Enthusiasts consider EVP to be a form of
paranormal phenomena often found in
recordings with static or other
background noise. However, psychologists
regard EVP as a form of auditory
pareidolia and a pseudoscience
promulgated by popular culture. Rational
explanations for EVP include apophenia,
equipment artifacts, and hoaxes.
History
As the Spiritualist religious movement
became prominent in the 1840s–1920s with
a distinguishing belief that the spirits
of the dead can be contacted by mediums,
new technologies of the era including
photography were employed by
spiritualists in an effort to
demonstrate contact with a spirit world.
So popular were such ideas that Thomas
Edison was asked in an interview with
Scientific American to comment on the
possibility of using his inventions to
communicate with spirits. He replied
that if the spirits were only capable of
subtle influences, a sensitive recording
device would provide a better chance of
spirit communication than the table
tipping and ouija boards mediums
employed at the time. However, there is
no indication that Edison ever designed
or constructed a device for such a
purpose. As sound recording became
widespread, mediums explored using this
technology to demonstrate communication
with the dead as well. Spiritualism
declined in the latter part of the 20th
century, but attempts to use portable
recording devices and modern digital
technologies to communicate with spirits
continued.
= Early interest=
American photographer Attila von Szalay
was among the first to try recording
what he believed to be voices of the
dead as a way to augment his
investigations in photographing ghosts.
He began his attempts in 1941 using a 78
rpm record, but it wasn't until 1956,
after switching to a reel-to-reel tape
recorder, that he believed he was
successful. Working with Raymond
Bayless, von Szalay conducted a number
of recording sessions with a custom-made
apparatus, consisting of a microphone in
an insulated cabinet connected to an
external recording device and speaker.
Szalay reported finding many sounds on
the tape that could not be heard on the
speaker at the time of recording, some
of which were recorded when there was no
one in the cabinet. He believed these
sounds to be the voices of discarnate
spirits. Among the first recordings
believed to be spirit voices were such
messages as "This is G!", "Hot dog,
Art!", and "Merry Christmas and Happy
New Year to you all". Von Szalay and
Raymond Bayless' work was published by
the Journal of the American Society for
Psychical Research in 1959. Bayless
later went on to co-author the 1979
book, Phone Calls From the Dead.
In 1959, Swedish painter and film
producer Friedrich Jürgenson was
recording bird songs. Upon playing the
tape later, he heard what he interpreted
to be his dead father's voice and then
the spirit of his deceased wife calling
his name. He went on to make several
more recordings, including one that he
said contained a message from his late
mother.
= Raudive voices=
Konstantin Raudive, a Latvian
psychologist who had taught at the
Uppsala University, Sweden and who had
worked in conjunction with Jürgenson,
made over 100,000 recordings which he
described as being communications with
discarnate people. Some of these
recordings were conducted in an
RF-screened laboratory and contained
words Raudive said were identifiable. In
an attempt to confirm the content of his
collection of recordings, Raudive
invited listeners to hear and interpret
them. He believed that the clarity of
the voices heard in his recordings
implied that they could not be readily
explained by normal means. Raudive
published his first book, Breakthrough:
An Amazing Experiment in Electronic
Communication with the Dead in 1968 and
it was translated into English in 1971.
= Spiricom and Frank's Box=
In 1980, William O'Neil constructed an
electronic audio device called "The
Spiricom". O'Neil claimed the device was
built to specifications which he
received psychically from George
Mueller, a scientist who had died six
years previously. At a Washington, DC
press conference on April 6, 1982,
O'Neil stated that he was able to hold
two-way conversations with spirits
through the Spiricom device, and
provided the design specifications to
researchers for free. However, nobody is
known to have replicated the results
O'Neil claimed using their own Spiricom
devices. O'Neil's partner, retired
industrialist George Meek, attributed
O'Neil's success, and the inability of
others to replicate it, to O'Neil's
mediumistic abilities forming part of
the loop that made the system work.
Another electronic device specifically
constructed in an attempt to capture EVP
is "Frank's Box" or the "Ghost Box",
created in 2002 by EVP enthusiast Frank
Sumption for supposed real-time
communication with the dead. Sumption
claims he received his design
instructions from the spirit world. The
device is described as a combination
white noise generator and AM radio
receiver modified to sweep back and
forth through the AM band selecting
split-second snippets of sound. Critics
of the device say its effect is
subjective and incapable of being
replicated, and since it relies on radio
noise, any meaningful response a user
gets is purely coincidental, or simply
the result of pareidolia.
= Modern interest=
In 1982, Sarah Estep founded the
American Association of Electronic Voice
Phenomena in Severna Park, Maryland, a
nonprofit organization with the purpose
of increasing awareness of EVP, and of
teaching standardized methods for
capturing it. Estep began her
exploration of EVP in 1976, and says she
has made hundreds of recordings of
messages from deceased friends,
relatives, and extraterrestrials whom
she speculated originated from other
planets or dimensions.
The term Instrumental
Trans-Communication was coined by Ernst
Senkowski in the 1970s to refer more
generally to communication through any
sort of electronic device such as tape
recorders, fax machines, television sets
or computers between spirits or other
discarnate entities and the living. One
particularly famous claimed incidence of
ITC occurred when the image of EVP
enthusiast Friedrich Jürgenson was said
to have appeared on a television in the
home of a colleague, which had been
purposefully tuned to a vacant channel.
ITC enthusiasts also look at the TV and
video camera feedback loop of the Droste
effect.
In 1979, parapsychologist D. Scott Rogo
described an alleged paranormal
phenomenon in which people report that
they receive simple, brief, and usually
single-occurrence telephone calls from
spirits of deceased relatives, friends,
or strangers. Rosemary Guiley has
written "within the parapsychology
establishment, Rogo was often faulted
for poor scholarship, which, critics
said, led to erroneous conclusions."
In 1995, the parapsychologist David
Fontana proposed in an article that
poltergeists could haunt tape recorders.
He speculated that this may have
happened to the parapsychologist Maurice
Grosse who investigated the Enfield
Poltergeist case. However, Tom Flynn a
media expert for the Committee for
Skeptical Inquiry examined Fontana's
article and suggested an entirely
naturalistic explanation for the
phenomena. According to the skeptical
investigator Joe Nickell "Occasionally,
especially with older tape and under
humid conditions, as the tape travels it
can adhere to one of the guide posts.
When this happens on a deck where both
supply and take-up spindles are powered,
the tape continues to feed, creating a
fold. It was such a loop of tape, Flynn
theorizes, that threaded its way amid
the works of Grosse’s recorder."
In 1997, Imants Barušs, of the
Department of Psychology at the
University of Western Ontario, conducted
a series of experiments using the
methods of EVP investigator Konstantin
Raudive, and the work of "instrumental
transcommunication researcher" Mark
Macy, as a guide. A radio was tuned to
an empty frequency, and over 81 sessions
a total of 60 hours and 11 minutes of
recordings were collected. During
recordings, a person either sat in
silence or attempted to make verbal
contact with potential sources of EVP.
Barušs stated that he did record several
events that sounded like voices, but
they were too few and too random to
represent viable data and too open to
interpretation to be described
definitively as EVP. He concluded:
"While we did replicate EVP in the weak
sense of finding voices on audio tapes,
none of the phenomena found in our study
was clearly anomalous, let alone
attributable to discarnate beings. Hence
we have failed to replicate EVP in the
strong sense." The findings were
published in the Journal of Scientific
Exploration in 2001, and include a
literature review.
In 2005, the Journal of the Society for
Psychical Research published a report by
paranormal investigator Alexander
MacRae. MacRae conducted recording
sessions using a device of his own
design that generated EVP. In an attempt
to demonstrate that different
individuals would interpret EVP in the
recordings the same way, MacRae asked
seven people to compare some selections
to a list of five phrases he provided,
and to choose the best match. MacRae
said the results of the listening panels
indicated that the selections were of
paranormal origin.
Portable digital voice recorders are
currently the technology of choice for
some EVP investigators. Since some of
these devices are very susceptible to
Radio Frequency contamination, EVP
enthusiasts sometimes try to record EVP
in RF- and sound-screened rooms.
Some EVP enthusiasts describe hearing
the words in EVP as an ability, much
like learning a new language. Skeptics
suggest that the claimed instances may
be misinterpretations of natural
phenomena, inadvertent influence of the
electronic equipment by researchers, or
deliberate influencing of the
researchers and the equipment by third
parties. EVP and ITC are seldom
researched within the scientific
community, so most research in the field
is carried out by amateur researchers
who lack training and resources to
conduct scientific research, and who are
motivated by subjective notions.
Explanations and origins
Paranormal claims for the origin of EVP
include living humans imprinting
thoughts directly on an electronic
medium through psychokinesis and
communication by discarnate entities
such as spirits, nature energies, beings
from other dimensions, or
extraterrestrials. Paranormal
explanations for EVP generally assume
production of EVP by a communicating
intelligence through means other than
the typical functioning of communication
technologies. Natural explanations for
reported instances of EVP tend to
dispute this assumption explicitly and
provide explanations which do not
require novel mechanisms that are not
based on recognized scientific
phenomena.
One study, by psychologist Imants
Barušs, was unable to replicate
suggested paranormal origins for EVP
recorded under controlled conditions.
Brian Regal in Pseudoscience: A Critical
Encyclopedia has written "A case can be
made for the idea that many EVPs are
artifacts of the recording process
itself with which the operators are
unfamiliar. The majority of EVPS have
alternative, nonspiritual sources;
anomalous ones have no clear proof they
are of spiritual origin."
= Natural explanations=
There are a number of simple scientific
explanations that can account for why
some listeners to the static on audio
devices may believe they hear voices,
including radio interference and the
tendency of the human brain to recognize
patterns in random stimuli. Some
recordings may be hoaxes created by
frauds or pranksters.
Psychology and perception
Auditory pareidolia is a situation
created when the brain incorrectly
interprets random patterns as being
familiar patterns. In the case of EVP it
could result in an observer interpreting
random noise on an audio recording as
being the familiar sound of a human
voice. The propensity for an apparent
voice heard in white noise recordings to
be in a language understood well by
those researching it, rather than in an
unfamiliar language, has been cited as
evidence of this, and a broad class of
phenomena referred to by author Joe
Banks as Rorschach Audio has been
described as a global explanation for
all manifestations of EVP.
Skeptics such as David Federlein, Chris
French, Terence Hines and Michael
Shermer say that EVP are usually
recorded by raising the "noise floor" –
the electrical noise created by all
electrical devices – in order to create
white noise. When this noise is
filtered, it can be made to produce
noises which sound like speech.
Federlein says that this is no different
from using a wah pedal on a guitar,
which is a focused sweep filter which
moves around the spectrum and creates
open vowel sounds. This, according to
Federlein, sounds exactly like some EVP.
This, in combination with such things as
cross modulation of radio stations or
faulty ground loops can cause the
impression of paranormal voices. The
human brain evolved to recognize
patterns, and if a person listens to
enough noise the brain will detect
words, even when there is no intelligent
source for them. Expectation also plays
an important part in making people
believe they are hearing voices in
random noise.
Apophenia is related to, but distinct
from pareidolia. Apophenia is defined as
"the spontaneous finding of connections
or meaning in things which are random,
unconnected or meaningless", and has
been put forward as a possible
explanation. According to the
psychologist James Alcock what people
hear in EVP recordings can best be
explained by apophenia, cross-modulation
or expectation and wishful thinking.
Alcock concluded "Electronic Voice
Phenomena are the products of hope and
expectation; the claims wither away
under the light of scientific scrutiny."
Physics
Interference, for example, is seen in
certain EVP recordings, especially those
recorded on devices which contain RLC
circuitry. These cases represent radio
signals of voices or other sounds from
broadcast sources. Interference from CB
Radio transmissions and wireless baby
monitors, or anomalies generated through
cross modulation from other electronic
devices, are all documented phenomena.
It is even possible for circuits to
resonate without any internal power
source by means of radio reception.
Capture errors are anomalies created by
the method used to capture audio
signals, such as noise generated through
the over-amplification of a signal at
the point of recording.
Artifacts created during attempts to
boost the clarity of an existing
recording might explain some EVP.
Methods include re-sampling, frequency
isolation, and noise reduction or
enhancement, which can cause recordings
to take on qualities significantly
different from those that were present
in the original recording.
The very first EVP recordings may have
originated from the use of tape
recording equipment with poorly aligned
erasure and recording heads, resulting
in the incomplete erasure of previous
audio recordings on the tape. This could
allow a small percentage of previous
content to be superimposed or mixed into
a new 'silent' recording.
Sporadic meteors and meteor showers
For all radio transmissions above 30 MHz
there is a possibility of meteor
reflection of the radio signal. Meteors
leave a trail of ionised particles and
electrons as they pass through the upper
atmosphere which reflect transmission
radio waves which would usually flow
into space. These reflected waves are
from transmitters which are below the
horizon of the received meteor
reflection. In Europe this means the
brief scattered wave may carry a foreign
voice which can interfere with radio
receivers. Meteor reflected radio waves
last between 0.05 seconds and 1 second,
depending on the size of the meteor.
Organizations that show interest in EVP
There are a number of organizations
dedicated to studying EVP and
instrumental transcommunication, or
which otherwise express interest in the
subject. Individuals within these
organizations may participate in
investigations, author books or journal
articles, deliver presentations, and
hold conferences where they share
experiences. In addition organizations
exist which dispute the validity of the
phenomena on scientific grounds.
The Association TransCommunication,
formerly the American Association of
Electronic Voice Phenomena, and the
International Ghost Hunters Society
conduct ongoing investigations of EVP
and ITC including collecting examples of
purported EVP available over the
internet. The Rorschach Audio Project,
initiated by sound artist Joe Banks,
which presents EVP as a product of radio
interference combined with auditory
pareidolia and the Interdisciplinary
Laboratory for Biopsychocybernetics
Research, a non-profit organization
dedicated to studying anomalous
phenomena related to neurophysiological
conditions. According to the AA-EVP it
is "the only organized group of
researchers we know of specializing in
the study of ITC".
Parapsychologists and Spiritualists have
an ongoing interest in EVP. Many
Spiritualists experiment with a variety
of techniques for spirit communication
which they believe provide evidence of
the continuation of life. According to
the National Spiritualist Association of
Churches, "An important modern day
development in mediumship is spirit
communications via an electronic device.
This is most commonly known as
Electronic Voice Phenomena". An informal
survey by the organization's Department
Of Phenomenal Evidence cites that 1/3 of
churches conduct sessions in which
participants seek to communicate with
spirit entities using EVP.
The James Randi Educational Foundation
offers a million dollars for proof that
any phenomena, including EVP, are caused
paranormally.
Cultural impact
The concept of EVP has had an impact on
popular culture. It is popular as an
entertaining pursuit, as in ghost
hunting, and as a means of dealing with
grief. It has influenced literature,
radio, film, television, and music.
= Groups=
Investigation of EVP is the subject of
hundreds of regional and national groups
and Internet message boards. Paranormal
investigator John Zaffis claims,
"There's been a boom in ghost hunting
ever since the Internet took off."
Investigators, equipped with electronic
gear—like EMF meters, video cameras, and
audio recorders—scour reportedly haunted
venues, trying to uncover visual and
audio evidence of ghosts. Many use
portable recording devices in an attempt
to capture EVP.
= Films=
Films involving EVP include Poltergeist,
The Sixth Sense, White Noise, and The
Changeling. It has also been featured on
television series like Ghost Whisperer,
The Omega Factor, A Haunting, Ghost
Hunters, MonsterQuest, Ghost Adventures,
The Secret Saturdays, Fact or Faked:
Paranormal Files, Supernatural, Derren
Brown Investigates, and Ghost Lab.
= TV and radio=
Coast To Coast AM hosts George Noory and
Art Bell have explored the topic of EVP
with featured guests such as Brendan
Cook and Barbara McBeath of the Ghost
Investigators Society, and paranormal
investigator and 'demonologist' Lou
Gentile. The Spirit of John Lennon, a
pay-per-view seance broadcast in 2006,
in which TV crew members, a psychic, and
an "expert in paranormal activity" claim
the spirit of former Beatle John Lennon
made contact with them through what was
described as "an Electronic Voice
Phenomenon."
= Novels=
Dead Lines: In the novel Dead Lines by
Greg Bear, a new type of analog cell
phone called Trans with global reach,
requiring no network of relay towers, is
promoted by the book's protagonist,
Peter Russell. The technology utilized
by Trans uses the nearly unlimited
quantum bandwidth by which subatomic
particles communicate with each other,
and when users of Trans begin to see
ghosts, Peter gradually discovers that
Trans has tapped into a channel where
human memories are stored and survive
the death of the body. Unfortunately,
Trans has made a noise and awakened
nameless things much older than human
beings, who feed on souls and memories.
Legion: Legion, a 1983 novel by William
Peter Blatty, contains a subplot where
Dr. Vincent Amfortas, a terminally ill
neurologist, leaves a
"to-be-opened-upon-my-death" letter for
Lt. Kinderman detailing his accounts of
contact with the dead, including the
doctor's recently deceased wife, Ann,
through EVP recordings. Amfortas'
character and the EVP subplot do not
appear in the film version of the novel,
The Exorcist III, although in
Kinderman's dream dead people are seen
trying to communicate with the living by
radio.
Pattern Recognition: In Pattern
Recognition, a 2003 novel by William
Gibson, the main character's mother
tries to convince her that her father is
communicating with her from recordings
after his death/disappearance in the
September 11, 2001 attacks.
= Theater and music=
In Nyctivoe a 2001 vampire-inspired play
by Dimitris Lyacos the male character as
well as his deceased companion are
speaking from a recording device amidst
a static/white noise background.
In With the people from the bridge, a
2014 play by Dimitris Lyacos based on
the idea of the return of the dead, the
voice of the female character NCTV is
transmitted from a television monitor
amidst a static/white noise background.
EVP is the subject of Vyktoria Pratt
Keating's song "Disembodied Voices on
Tape" from her 2003 album Things that
Fall from the Sky, produced by Andrew
Giddings of Jethro Tull.
Laurie Anderson's "Example #22", from
her 1981 album Big Science, interposes
spoken sentences and phrases in German
with sung passages in English
representing EVP.
See also
Parapsychology
Mediumship
Speech synthesis
Speech recognition
Backward message
Ghost hunting
Reverse speech
Auditory hallucination
List of topics characterized as
pseudoscience
References
