DISCLAIMER: Do not read this article unless you have insomnia and need something to help you get to sleep!
This will be for many, a boring attempt at a scientific opinion concerning AVP (capable of being heard with the human ear) & EVP, captured by audio recorders exclusively and capable of being heard with the human ear as well! This opinion excludes ghost boxes, Ovilus and synthesized voice/talker devices. Pro-ghost box arguments such as stochastic resonance in white noise can be approached in another article at a later date.
"It looks like a star." These were the words uttered by my wife to me one day as she looked out the window. Heard by me in passing through the room, without previous conversation segue or any topical context I was cognizant of, I asked her to repeat what she just said to me. The reason for my request was simply because I heard only the ending words of her spoken phrase which sounded to me as "your guitar" (I play guitar). The first part of the words she spoke were unintelligible to my initial understanding.
Here is another personal observational example before I proceed with my opinion on understanding the breakdown of an EVP, that being, our brains expect acoustic patterns that match patterns for a particular word.
What was heard: "I'll call your lawyer." Having just watched a TV show pertaining to a lawsuit, the subject matter was still fresh on my mind. What was actually spoken: "I'll call you later," spoken by my wife as she was leaving for an appointment and while my mind was not focused on what she was saying.
I'm sure this kind of thing has been experienced by you, the reader before. Someone said one thing but you heard something different. Why is that? It all may come down to one thing... a lack of visual confirmation plus cognitive bias. At the time you heard something, your visual focus was not associated with either the visual object of the vocalization or topical subject. Pertaining to the two examples above, my lack of auditory focus prevented an understanding of the beginning of the spoken phrase. My brain wasn't ready to hear it, but milliseconds later, my brain turned its focused attention to the phrase, captured the remainder of it and applied a cognitive meaning as best as it could.
Here is one Linguistic Expert at UMass' opinion related to the "ganong-effect."
"here are some ideas. (1) A listeners’ linguistic knowledge is likely to create a response bias for the word-making category when the target sound is final in the string, because the listener has already heard all the sounds but one that are necessary to activate a word, (2) their linguistic knowledge is instead likely to influence evidence accumulation when the target is initial, as they have to wait until all the following sounds have been heard to activate a word beginning with one category and not the other. This predicts that linguistic knowledge should interact with response times differently for initial and final targets. (3) Degrading the signal with noise should increase reliance on lexical knowledge for initial and final targets similarly because it hinders recognition of the sounds that would activate a word. (4) How a cognitive load influences the size of the effect may depend on whether the load consists of a linguistic task."
Something called "The McGurk Effect" shows how vision affects hearing. This YouTube video about this effect provide a clearer understanding of this: (https://youtu.be/G-lN8vWm3m0). According to Professor Lawrence Rosenblum in this video, "when the brain is presented with conflicting information, it tries to make sense of that conflict. And depending on what type of modality is providing more salient information, that information might override or at least combine with the other information."
Let's take the popular brain teaser "GREEN NEEDLE - BRAINSTORM." If you are not familiar with it, check it out on You Tube and come back to this article. It is a prime example of your brain trying to make sense of something that is ambiguous to your hearing for various reasons but your associated visual focus causes subjective interpretation. Bottom Line: what we “hear” during real-world conversation might come not from our ears but from our brain.
In order to come to an educated opinion on this or any topic, I always try to solicit observations of experts in other fields. Here are two such opinions:
"I think the main idea was that when you consider the three main resonances of the vocal tract, you can accidentally hear the second resonance as the first (particularly when there is artificially-enhanced high frequencies), and misattribute the tongue advancement as the tongue height.
I'm not sure if it completes, the puzzle, but it actually overlaps a bit with something we see in people with hearing loss, who sometimes misperceive the /i/ ("ee") and /u/ ("oo") vowels. Words like Leap and Loop are tough to distinguish because the high-frequency second resonance of Leap can be misperceived to be the second resonance, which would make it fit into the expectation for Loop. Green Needle - Brainstorm is more complicated than a single vowel, and more complicated than Laurel/Yanny for sure, but I'm not aware of any work that has looked at it systematically."
"I have seen the internet phenomena you mention. My personal take is that two factors are at work here. The first is the ability of the recipient to hear harmonics in the "speech" pattern. This would be effected by both the age / hearing frequency range of the recipient. The harmonic content differs between the words "Green Needle" and Brainstorm". I would suspect most older people hear Green Needle; younger people hear Brainstorm. The reason is Brainstorm has a higher harmonic content and as such requires a more acute hearing. That's not the only thing that affects it. The frequency response of the computer / sound card / headphones you use will also impose limitations. These conditions will determine which word you hear. But there is another factor present in this puzzle. The puzzle uses a computer modified voice, not a human voice speaking the word. This imparts a new set of parameters. The normal rules for speech do not apply since the sound is not really human speech. Harmonic content differs, and the mind is more likely to form pareidolia under these conditions. All told it is way to fool the mind, which phrase you hear will depend on your expectations."
Adding to the above expert opinions, my own humble one is that I am unaware of any associated neuronal activity studies, particularly pointed to the brain's decision making at onset of hearing the phonetic "burst" in the first syllable of each of these or other similar computer modified voice phrases? On an audio spectrogram, the F2 & F3 formants of Green Needle/Brainstorm appear consistent/similar and would appear to indicate the association with the visual target is made at that point... I repeat... association with a visual target!
The lack of visual association contributes to difficulties when analyzing EVP. Too many times have I experienced or noted from others, "we didn't hear it ourselves, but we captured it on audio." The smallest of time difference between the right or left ears receiving a particular sound allows the brain to calculate the angle of sound source and focus hearing on it. This may not be the side of your body the EVP came from, thus you only hear it on the recording. Immediately, cognitive bias comes into play. Our brains often work off our visual focus, tuning into the source of our visual focus at the expense of other sounds, no different than when you focus on a particular conversation in a crowd or party. Our mind knows where we were when the audio was captured and who we were attempting contact with. It formulates an interpretation based on that. I have proven this myself in the field with artificially produced "talker/phonetic" type devices. Just once, I would love to see the TV ghost shows submit their EVP "evidence" to an outside lab for analysis and interpretation without any related background to the EVP itself. Let's hear those results instead of the paranormal team's opinion of what is being captured on audio! Make me a believer that way.
Another solicited expert opinion : "it's very easy to convince someone that they're hearing language, because the brain tries very hard to find patterns even in random signals. And if the signals have any structural resemblance to speech, the brain fills in the rest. Although I imagine this is a roadblock for you in paranormal research, it's also the foundation of why cochlear implants are so successful; they provide a very sparse and noisy signal but the brain can do a lot of good with it."
Of course, all of this precludes the fact that these TV ghost show EVP are not subject to a more intense scrutiny process. How about discarding artificially produced ones and dealing only with those having vocal content? Are they put to the test on an oscilloscope and audio spectrogram to look for phonemic clues as to what is actually being spoken? It isn't being done as far as I am aware of, except by more highly trained and capable people such as the electrical engineer that I correspond with. Okay, be ready to be really bored out of your mind... possibly. This is what he does with a typical EVP that might draw his attention to the need for further scrutiny:
"The spectrum analyzer serves much better since it displays the entire range of frequencies present as well as the relative strength of each. From that I can determine what areas to concentrate my evaluation and disregard those frequencies that seem to be not a part of the suspected EVP. To explain my method is difficult since the exact details develop based on the results of earlier steps. But to generalize, once the frequencies are isolated I run the audio through a bandpass filter that is set to only those frequencies where the suspected EVP is present. The audio is then displayed on a scope. Next step is to view each phoneme and determine its characteristics; rise time, decay time, blend factors, etc. This is where the pareidolia is eliminated. Often what seems to be a word will be found to be missing phonemes, or they may not be correct for speech. Example a thump at 200 Hz will appear quite different than a vocal sound at 200 Hz Harmonics and other nuances will differ, thus a thump can be eliminated while the vocalization can be kept. This process goes on , checking each phoneme until the entire message is completed. Often the message may be done with several versions as some of this is subjective. It is tested using different criteria just to be certain all possibilities are included. The altered message is then reassembled and evaluated against the original. If significant differences occur, the process is repeated, or the audio deemed not valid. If substantially the same the interpretation would tend toward a valid recording. As I said this is a generalization of the process. If noise is present often I add a step to remove extraneous noise. It is opposite what I describe above. The speech frequencies are removed leaving only the offending sounds. Once this track is obtained, I run both it and the original recording through a summing amplifier. The noise track is inverted, the audio is not. Levels of the noise track are adjusted so that the noise is the same amplitude in both tracks, but they are 180 degrees out of phase. The summing amplifier adds the two algebraically, cancelling the noise and leaving the audio. Once this is done I repeat the original analysis process as stated above. It is a time consuming process, I always figure on about 1-2 hours for each minute of audio I do. But it takes the common debunking claim of pareidolia out of the mix. It also eliminates 99.9% of claimed EVP. But what remains is very strong evidence that can stand up to most arguments. It also why I have to laugh when some claim they got several EVP on one investigation. It is just not that common, especially once the recordings are put through a thorough analysis."
I personally have grown tired of the plethora of continued useless claims of legitimate spirit contact through EVP, and their contrived, associated explanations of intent, made to fit their investigative situation upon instantaneous playback of the recording. How can the field of paranormal research be advanced beyond simple claims such as these to a point where possible methods of communication can be hypothesized and tested with a hope of success in reality, not perpetuated folklore? If you are going to claim to have actual spirit contact captured on EVP, then please also take the time to not only outline the physical limitations of the recording device you are using, but also limitations a spirit would need to overcome in order to generate speech capable of being captured on an audio recorder. Since sound is vibrations traveling through air, please explain exactly how the spirit was able to interact with air and not only produce sound but in turn hear it as well. Do this in order to validate your EVP, explaining how the spirit essence of that once corporeal being has now acquired such magical, vocal powers that are absent of any physical mechanism to produce them.
This article should not be taken as an attack on those with differing opinions than my own. Hopefully to some, this will provide conversational fodder when it comes to the topic of alleged paranormal evidence of the AVP/EVP nature.
I, for one, treat the ghost TV shows for what I perceive in my opinion to be purely entertainment, as they give no credence to such opinions as the acoustic experts offered in this article. I will continue to be amused by their use of pseudoscientific equipment, at times exhibiting their amazement by exclaiming "Oh my God" countless times for dramatic effect and even running in fear from the very thing they came to investigate.
Something anomalistic and unexplained is captured on audio recordings at times. I'm just not ready to say it's proof of the afterlife. The following are a few of my own that I cannot yet explain:
Inside an abandoned railroad tunnel, I suddenly feel as if I was pushed backwards and this audio capture seems to be saying, "do not look up." It would tie in nicely with the fact I was trespassing on the domain of a suspected elemental:
https://soundcloud.com/moon-joey/elemental-in-cave-evp-captured-do-not-rest-is-unintelligible
While my wife & I were sound asleep in a former operating room of a late 1800's Tuberculosis Hospital, these strange movement noises and screams of pain were captured. We somehow slept right through this:
https://soundcloud.com/moon-joey/evp-screaming-in-former-hospital-operating-room
My strangest capture was in a very old house with an antique mirror at the top of the stairs on the 2nd floor. Using a laser striking the mirror at an angle with a receptor at the other end, this sound wav of what sounds like a confused little girl saying, "what is that thing?" I was alone at the time of this capture:
https://soundcloud.com/moon-joey/the-child-spirit-in-the-mirror
Happy Ghost Hunting!
- MoonJoey
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