Electronic Voice Phenomenon or Ghost sounds
I have heard some of it and it sounds very freaky but I’m not 100 per cent committed to believing it is real or not real. Believe it or not, I have never heard a skeptics take on EVP.
I believe it may have something to do with spirits but how do skeptics explain EVP?
well I’m a skeptic, here’s my explanation. The air waves around us are filled with eletromagnetic radiation that transmits information. Cordless phones. Cell phones. AM/FM radio. Broadcast TV. An antenae can be made very easily, and can also be made accidentally. What type of equipment are they using to record this EVP? is it always the same tape recorder? Does the EVP show up no matter what recording method you use? Maybe the tape has been previously re-recorded so many times that it is left with interference from a previous recording.
Just because you hear “voices” on a recording does not prove that those are dead voices. Even if we have no way of understanding where those voices on the tape came from, how do you jump to the conclusion that their dead people?
Think about ghosting on a television set, sometimes you’ll see one channel super imposed over another channel. does this mean that the people from the 2nd channel are dead? Similar interference can happen with audio equipment as well.
There was a GQ thread about this just a few days ago - Here’s the link.
I’ve seen photos of images showing up in the static on TV. Sometimes these look like people but other times I think it’s a case of people wanting to see something. If you watch something in static long enough you’ll see a couple of blotches that look like mouth and eyes. I can also point out pictures in a stucco wall or amongst the stars in the sky.
The same thing with the EVP. Some examples seem to be saying something, but other times just garble.
The Exploratorium in San Francisco had an exhibit which highlighted the tendency of the human ear to insert false meaning into speech sounds. It’s no longer online, but the setup is simple enough that you can try it at home. Simply make a digital recording of a short phrase such as “My badger has Herpes”, and then set your computer to play it back over and over. The first several times you hear the recording, it’s easy to pick out the original phrase, but after 15 or 20 repeats, you start noticing different interpretations of the noise: “My bad ear has peas”, “please my bajeer has her” etc. etc.
If you’re consciously asking your ear to find patterns, it will find them in abundance.
People will hear whatever they want to in noises. I have never heard a “ghost voice” in an EVP. It always sounds garbled.
How often are song lyrics misunderstood because of the way they are spoken or how the instruments cover them? For example, Peter Frampton made his guitar “speak” in the song “Do You Feel Like We Do?”. It was just a collection of noises arranged in a way to sound vaguely like a human voice. EVP is an accidental kind of manipulation in the same way.
Skeptics don’t debunk it often because it is so easy to explain away, and because they have better things to do, like prove the moon landings were real.