So I was listening to this radio programme last night:
http://www.bbc.co.uk/cgi-perl/whatson/prog_parse.cgi?FILENAME=20041220/20041220_2030_49700_53956_30
Anyone know if there’s a rational explanation which covers all instances of EVP? I’ve had a search on the webs but most sites have got a high ‘whacko’ count. 
This is apparent voices on playback of recorded sounds thought not to have originally included audible voices?
I think it’s probably down to a number of factors, including:
-Forgery/hoaxes
-Equipment failure/misfunction (i.e. failure to properly erase the recording medium, crosstalk, RF interference)
-The remarkable propensity for the human mind to see patterns that are not really there - on a sort of related note, there’s a guy out there somewhere (I’ll try to find a link) who claims that when any voice is recorded and played back in reverse, intelligible spoken phrases can be heard that betray the true inner thoughts of the speaker. He’s nuts, of course.
A sufficiently complex sound can be quite subtly moulded by the mind of the listener. On long car journeys as a child, I used to lie back and listen to the road noise - I would start thinking about a piece of music in my head and before long, I could hear it in the road noise; start thinking about another song and I would hear that one - not just in my head, but actually seem to hear it as real and audible. Perception is a funny thing.
Back during Halloween when many cable channels were doing ‘ghost’ shows, I happend across Discovery Kids and they were investigating ghosts and EVP.
Oddly enough the kiddie show was very straingt foward about the subject. The adult scientest explained to the kid (teen) researchers that there is no recorded evidence of a ghost anywhere. No photos, no EVP, nothing. Everything the kids found at haunted sites was shown to not be ghostly but quite normal.
And this was thier Halloween special.
Basically, it would be very easy for someone to say, “But what about…” to any explaination to EVP. Sooner or later the people that explain these things get tired and stop explaining and then the believer says “Scientests could not explain this” and goes on thinking what they want.
EVP is usually a bad interpertation of noise. Or there is a sound source that the people making the recording did not know about or investigate.
In addition to EVP’s you also have “orbs” taken on some photo’s at haunted locations. The conventional perspective is that these are nothing but insects, light anomalies, or other photographic remnants. What is interesting about EVP’s and orbs is that they can at least be tested. Consider the following potential experiments or tests that could be performed:
a. If EVP’s and Orbs represent an objective phenominum then they should occur more together than apart. If I take a thousand “measurements” for orbs and EVP’s at a hundred locations I should see a correlation between their occurance (that is statistically significant) .
b. If EVP’s represent ghosts then they should occur more frequently at “haunted” locations than elsewhere.
c. If “orbs” are “objectively real” then we should be able to photograph them from multiple angles with stationary camera’s that fire at the same time. Furthermore, successive pictures should reveal motion or movement in the “orbs”.
The problem is that you tend to have hard core skeptics or true believers neither side is willing to apply experimental protocals to the issue.
No, the problem is that according to the ‘true believers’, there’s no set of tests that can actually examine the presence of these things (how do you imagine you’d ‘test’ for the presence of EVP?) That is, their psychic can find 'em, but if anyone else can’t, it’s because they’re not tuned to the cosmic vibrations or whatever. These things have, of course, been tested, and lots of times at that. But no amount of testing is ever enough to convince the true believers, because they don’t believe in the concept of empirical testing. That’s how they get beliefs in things like this in the first place.
Has anyone done a computer analysis of these reported “voices”. It should be relatively easy to determine if they are actually human voices, or just random noise.
I suspect that because the believers never present such evidence, that the “voices” are either:
-produced by the imagination
-or, acually pickups of two way radio, or TV/radio transmissions, or cross-talk.
Anybody know about this?
Any chance this was some kind of promotion for the upcoming thriller “White Noise”?
http://www.apple.com/trailers/universal/white_noise/index.html
This dude is the one with the reverse speech site. Pretty f*cked up stuff.
I played the testimonials backwards and they say it’s all a scam. But if it works, how can it be a scam? :eek: obbybray adybray!
As Mangetout says, the human brain is good at finding apparent patterns in random stimuli - this may be especially true of speech sounds; the distinctions between phonemes can be very subtle, and there is a phenomenon called “categorial perception” which comes into play (whereby an indistinct sound gets fitted into the closest matching “category” by the brain when it’s doing the processing.)
So Electronic Voice Phenomena are undoubtedly “real”, in the sense that people are listening to static and hearing voices - the sound frequencies that make up the “voices” are physically present; they’re just being assembled, as it were, into coherent (or partially coherent) speech by the listener’s brains. (Neither hearing nor vision are entirely passive senses, there’s a whole lot of interpretation goes on inside the brain for both of these.)
What EVP quite certainly isn’t, is Ghostly Messages From The Great Beyond. It’s a phenomenon which is entirely explicable in conventional scientific terms. No need to postulate any ghosts to account for it.
To add to {b]Steve**'s post, this phenomenon is not just restricted to sound.
The brain will also compose sight in the same way, where something indistinct will be modelled into something recognisable, and this explains ‘ghost sightings’.
Just about everyone will have experienced this, you see someting in poor light, or at a distance or in heat haze and you thinks its one thing, but when you get cloeser its actually something else, often it turns out to be something you didn’t expect and seems out of context.
I have to say: I’ve seen a lot of the evidence for these “orbs” and most of them look exactly like the sort of artifacts you see all the time in photography. That or the darkroom in my high school was spooky haunted.
If they represent the same objective phenomenon. I’m not trying to argue for their reality, but let’s take the logical high road here.
“Some of the ‘voices’ are most likely people creating meaning out of random noise, a kind of auditory pareidolia [the illusion that something obscure is real] or apophenia [mentally connecting unrelated phenomena],” writes Robert Carroll, Ph.D. on his Web site, The Skeptic’s Dictionary.
“Humans are exceptionally wonderful at finding patterns in noise,” says Edwin C. May, Ph.D., president of the Laboratories for Fundamental Research. “The hardware in our sensory system is designed to see changes in things.” So when we hear repeated sounds, our brain picks out and pieces together what sounds to us like spoken words. If you listen to thousands of pieces of audio, Dr. May contends, you’ll eventually find one that sounds like a voice. “It’s the monkey on the typewriter issue.”
EVP researchers counter that the highly interactive communication they have engaged in would be impossible to discount as interference or brain tricks. “I have been an amateur radio operator for 40 years, and I have never had tape or digital recorders pick up any artificial interference,” says Oester. “Also, how can an interactive EVP, where the spirit is responding to my questions or commenting on my words, ever be considered interference?”
http://www.mcmsys.com/~brammer/ourbest.htm
Here are some files if you want to listen to some. I’m sure there are alot better examples though. 90%+ do sound like people just finding patterns in vague static, I do not know about the others though.
This is an interesting phenomenon. I was an enthusiastic spelunker for many years and had the (very bad!) habit of entering and exploring caves alone. There was always some water in the caves I entered and one of my favorite treats was to sit down and make a cup of tea. After I had the tea made, I’d turn off all the lights and just sit quetly for a while, sipping my tea and listening to the water trickle along.
Invariably, after maybe 5 minutes, the water sounds would morph into voices. I could almost understand them but never quite. The voices always seemed to be coming from just around the bend of the cave.
Like you, I would suspect that the EVP thing is just a variant of this.
Regards
Testy
Here’s another article: http://www.csicop.org/specialarticles/evp.html