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EVPs?

I had a guitar amp that used to channel spirit voices.

Or, it might have been the police band coming through.
Spooky either way.
 
vIQleS said:
A good explaination I heard was from an applicant for the MDC.

We were trying to help him nail down a protocol and it transpired that he wanted to use a particular brand of digital recorder...

An audio expert chimed in and explained that that brand had been designed for voice recording and had circuitry in it that amplified certain frequencies (voice range - to improve recoding quality / pickup)

It's most likely nothing to do with radio (AFAIK).

You're listening to static, and your brain is finding bits that sound like words. Same as backmasking.

Nothing hard about this one at all I'm afraid.
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The Panasonic RR-DR60.

Apparently it's the "must have" make/model of EVP recorder for the discerning ghost hunter's toolkit... right alongside the proton pack and the dowsing rods.

Ghost Finders Scotland

http://www.ghostfinders.co.uk/the_tron_kirk.html

Equipment Used
Panasonic RR-DR60 Recorders
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Los Vegas Paranormal Investigations

http://www.freewebs.com/lasvegasghosts/evpsandaudio.htm

EVP's caught at Redd Foxx's mansion on a Panasonic RR-DR60
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I listened to the "EVP" hoping to hear, "Lamont! You big dummy!" I was dissappointed. :(


EVP Research Association UK

http://www.evpuk.com/evp_equipment.html

One of the most talked about digital recorders for recording EVP is that of the Panasonic RR-DR60 IC Recorder. The RR-DR60 is a voice activated recorder that has shown over time that it is highly effective for capturing EVP. Inexplicable voices seem to come through on this recorder in abundance, even when used inside a Faraday Cage to rule out external interference. Unfortunately many of voices captured on the RR-DR60 seem to be extremely distorted and require much work using filtering software.
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I'd really like to see someone do a little trial.

Use two or three different recorders to record sounds in an attempt to pick up EVPs. Let's get say ten samples from each, recorded in various locations including a quiet office, a house, a cemetery and a "haunted" location. Choose ten samples, say fifteen seconds in length.

Play each of those ten samples to ten people, a mix of skeptics, EVP believers and average people off the street. Have each person write down what they hear in each sample. Do not give them any clues at all of what they're "supposed" to hear.

Compare the results. What do you suppose the odds are that the majority of people would hear the same things?
 
I've tried simpler tests: I took an EVP that everyone was claiming was SOOO CLEAR, and distributed it without any clues, for comment.

No one got the words that the EVP group was claiming to hear. Many didn't even hear words.

So that can be another kind of test: find an EVP group online that posts EVPS; find one that they claim is unmistakable, and circulate that one.

Sometime, I will do this back to the same group (several months after it is first posted, and with the file under a new name), and see if these same people still hear the same thing.


FramerDave said:
I'd really like to see someone do a little trial.

Use two or three different recorders to record sounds in an attempt to pick up EVPs. Let's get say ten samples from each, recorded in various locations including a quiet office, a house, a cemetery and a "haunted" location. Choose ten samples, say fifteen seconds in length.

Play each of those ten samples to ten people, a mix of skeptics, EVP believers and average people off the street. Have each person write down what they hear in each sample. Do not give them any clues at all of what they're "supposed" to hear.

Compare the results. What do you suppose the odds are that the majority of people would hear the same things?
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Way back when I was a kid, radios didn't have fancy electronic tuners that could filter out bleed from stations on nearby frequencies or interference from far away stations on the same frequency. So it was perfectly normal and mundane to turn your radio knob and get little snippets of speech or music. There was no expectation that the spaces between 91.1 and 91.5 would contain silence.

I think that explains much of the EVP phenomenon. People just don't know how radios and TVs work and how many man-made broadcasts are out there. Sometimes, maybe most times, EVP is pareidolia applied to static, but other times people are hearing actual voices - the voices of disk jockeys, announcers, and actors.
 
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Aside from issues of devices picking up stray snippets of broadcasts, I think there's a good degree of confirmation bias involved. Ghost hunters expect to hear something, so of course their mind will fill in the blanks.
 
An experiment that might be interesting would be to digitally copy recordings alleged to contain EVPs to a digital audio workstation and then provide listeners with some simple controls- PLAY, STOP and REWIND buttons, a timecode display fed from the TC output of the workstation and, if possible, a set of "capture current TC address buttons (all this would be easy to do with a ProTools rig and an SSL console).

Listeners would be instructed to stop playback whenever they heard something appearing to be speech and capture the TC address of the point in the recording where they heard it. They would not be given any cues as to what to listen for- just instructions to keep an ear peeled for anything resembling speech.

On successive runs the recoding being listened to would be changed- the files would be chosen randomly from a set including alleged EVPs, similar recordings not alleged to contain EVPs and dummy files created with a digital psuedorandom noise source and known not to contain anything but a series of pseudorandom sample values.

The question would be whether the same listener flags the same parts of the same recordings consistently as containing something sounding like speech, whether different listeners produce similar results and whether the listeners perceive speech in the "EVP" set, the "non-EVP" set or the "dummy" set.

If there is in fact something intelligible in a particular recording I would expect the same person to flag it at the same point in the recording irrespective of where or how many times in the series of files it was presented.

If there's nothing I would expect the results to be all over the place.

The purpose of restricting the quesion to "do you hear anything that sounds like intelligible speech" would be to eliminate the inevitable arguments about "what does it say".
 
Psiload said:
The Panasonic RR-DR60.

Apparently it's the "must have" make/model of EVP recorder for the discerning ghost hunter's toolkit... right alongside the proton pack and the dowsing rods.
(
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Wait, ghosts prefer a certain brand of recorder? Are there endorsement deals in the Great Beyond?
 
FramerDave said:
I'd really like to see someone do a little trial.

Use two or three different recorders to record sounds in an attempt to pick up EVPs. Let's get say ten samples from each, recorded in various locations including a quiet office, a house, a cemetery and a "haunted" location. Choose ten samples, say fifteen seconds in length.

Play each of those ten samples to ten people, a mix of skeptics, EVP believers and average people off the street. Have each person write down what they hear in each sample. Do not give them any clues at all of what they're "supposed" to hear.

Compare the results. What do you suppose the odds are that the majority of people would hear the same things?
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I think it's important to note here that the question is not "Can people hear things?", but "Is it supernatural?"

I don't see any reason why an EVP mightn't be perfectly distinguishable by different people. We all know that the brain can pull audible patterns out of static and i'd hate the trubees to be able to say "the skeptics tested it and people heard the same thing..."

This misses the point - are the voices ghosts?

(Not that these wouldn't be interesting tests - I'd love to see it done. Just don't tell the trubees if it works :-P)
 
That meakes sense about [people hearing things because they expect to hear them, or want to hear them. A lot of the songs with the EVP's are old, and how many times did you hear them without noticing? Then when you are told, youre waiting for the voice. But I listened to some without being told what words were 'said' and I could hear voices but not make out the words until my son told me what everyone heard, then it fit. (Not sure on which songs they were now, its been a while.)
 
shandyjan said:
That meakes sense about [people hearing things because they expect to hear them, or want to hear them. A lot of the songs with the EVP's are old, and how many times did you hear them without noticing? Then when you are told, youre waiting for the voice. But I listened to some without being told what words were 'said' and I could hear voices but not make out the words until my son told me what everyone heard, then it fit. (Not sure on which songs they were now, its been a while.)
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Rock songs are like that for me. I can never make out the lyrics unless I see them written.
 
Eyeron said:
For example, if it is the recording of a radio broadcast, how could it be picked up by a normal tape recorder without anybody else hearing it?
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Am I reading you right? Do you think a radio broadcast is actually audio itself and not electromagnetic waves?
 
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