If you are a paranormal investigator, you have no doubt experienced the allure of EVPs, often characterized as anomalous voice recordings. That description itself exudes bias. I'm not referring to countless stories and alleged evidence presented by others that could influence your beliefs in audio spirit contact. I'm talking about your own personal experiences and data gathering. I want to explore some of these situations in this article, keeping the article title in mind as this is done.
To begin, the most prevalent idea concerning sensory processing is that our brain is a passive organ, constantly reacting to and acting on external stimuli. More and more, continued research indicates the nature of our perception as an intentional yet subconscious selective process. Could this be the same process with which we govern our personal decisions concerning EVP and even disembodied voices? It turns out that it boils down more to our ears than our brain.
Our right and left ears process sound differently. Preferential processing by the left and right hemispheres of the brain influences the right ear for listening in every day situations, being more attuned to the key frequencies used for speech. The left ear is more tuned or sensitive to the lower frequencies rich in background noises. Could this explain why some people claim to hear audible spirit voices while others don't? Could it be simply because of the situational direction they we are facing at the time of the alleged spirit vocalization? Could this also explain why an audio recorder would capture voices that we ourselves claim to not have physically heard? 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. Also, the smallest of time difference between the right or left side 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, and again causes you to only hear it on the recording.
Scientific research tells us that the actual "hearing" of sounds occurs in our auditory cortex. The complex process involves sound waves moving through the air striking our eardrums, causing a vibration that sends electrical signals to the auditory cortex which then attempts to identify and tell our brain what those sounds are. Research shows, however that in environments involving stimuli lacking active noise/sound, measurements of brain activity indicate the brain attempting to fill in that silence. Other research has shown that the stimulation of one sensory or cognitive pathway automatically provokes the stimulation of another. Investigating a dark, quiet haunted location with our senses heightened seems to be a perfect place for this to happen. Ghost hunting aside, haven't you ever been in a personal situation where due to indirect attention being paid, you heard something spoken totally different that what the speaker claimed to have said or vice versa?
A 'Nature Scientific Reports' research study subjected hundreds of still images to test volunteers. The images suggested both silence and sound, such as a woman sitting quietly reading a book or another playing a wind instrument. Electrical activity being measured during these experiments indicated the subject's auditory cortex was stimulated by pictures that implied associated sounds. Another study found that approximately 21% of subjects, when exposed to brief flashes of light, reported being able to associate faint sounds where one was not present. This phenomenon is known as visually-evoked auditory response. Seeing an alleged shadow person might even come into play on this one. Where are some of these EVP recordings coming from that were never heard by an investigator but show up on replay of the recording? Is it possible for a non-corporeal source to be able to make a sound in the physical world? Is there a plausible explanation beyond the ridiculous "the spirits use energy" assertion?
From a certain electrical engineer (name withheld for privacy reasons - I consider this man 'genius' level) that I have associated myself with through numerous correspondence, I quote:
"Intelligent spirit communication needs defined. We can't say with any validity that what we obtain as EVP / AVP is actually "spirit communication." We can't say with certainty that spirits are able to even communicate with us in any form. That said other possibilities may be some form of interdimensional contact that has nothing to do with spirits. It may in fact be some form of energy that is technology oriented. We might be the ants in some cosmic ant farm for all we know. And "they" might be allowing "communication" to simply study our responses to it. (No proof for that theory either, but it is as good as the "spirit" theory many subscribe to.)
I would speculate that neural activity is not a part of EVP/AVP since by definition EVP is electronic voice phenomena. As such any direct neural communication bypasses the need for electronic devices. This would put such communication, if it exists, outside the EVP definition and more toward some form of psychic intervention.
As far as ascribing EVP/AVP to God, I would say that is not the explanation. I base this on the claims that God has spoken to man throughout history, long before we had the electronics that is a key part of EVP research. Such communication has always been done directly to the intended individuals, and always with a specific purpose. (the Bible is full of such cases) What is not evident is any case where God has spoken to anyone just to do so. There is always a message to be conveyed, usually some form of teaching or warning. So I seriously doubt that God is responsible for any EVP message or response to some ghost hunter asking "is anyone here"? God it seems has better things to do than waste time with such drivel."
Personally, I pay little attention to photos or recordings of others. They make for a nice little story but do nothing to bring factual proof of paranormal communication to the table. I have learned to subject my own EVPs to "the rule of 3." This involves no preconditioning by the listeners. Each of the three listen on their own, first to separate out suspected spirit voices. Next to analyze those same selections alone. When each of the three compare selections, a consensus can be made on which to retain for further scrutiny together. They must each separately listen to those and log the words they believe are being spoken. The final step is to listen to those EVPs with the knowledge of what the others believe they heard. I have thrown out 99% of my EVPs based on this method. It is fascinating to find how one person can hear something totally different than another when listening to the same EVP. It usually causes arguments about what is heard on them, however these disagreements are indicative of a common factor in auditory pareidolia and thus cause the EVP to be disregarded from that specific standpoint.
For those EVPs that get past this scrutiny method, they are then subjected to oscilloscope and spectrogram analysis for voice pattern recognition, looking for such things as indications of direct vocalization and fricatives. This process has left me with less than 5 unexplainable EVPS over 10 years of data collection. Meanwhile, any TV ghost hunter show will claim to collect more than that in any one hour episode! Decide for yourself if what they are presenting to you is worthy of belief.
Voice synthesization in phonetic generator devices and ghost boxes do not compare to true speech, therefore I no longer use them for investigation data collection. Phonetic generators use a phoneme generator chip to assemble enough phonemes to create a word from a predetermined library. The spirit would have to interact with the processor, holding each phoneme while accessing the next memory location, retrieving that specific phoneme until the entire word or phrase is completed. An example would be six words, "someone is at the front door" that requires 39 phonemes to be generated. This is all activated by environmental conditions as the triggering mechanism. There is no hardware that allows a spirit to interface with the speech synthesizer in any way. That's quite a lot of trouble that spirit is going through, wouldn't you say? The main supportive contention with a ghost box is EM fields producing EVP. But, keep in mind the complexity required to produce a modulated versus unmodulated signal. I am constantly amazed at how the "inverse square law of sound" is disregarded in relation to this device as well, and there is absolutely no proof a spirit can produce either type of signal. I would propose that if a spirit were able to do so it would stand to reason it would more likely be the simpler version, unmodulated, thus eliminating the need for demodulation with a carrier being reinserted at the receiving end in proper phase, frequency and amplitude. Taking this communication one step further is reporting of various languages believed being spoken ... a very talented spirit indeed! Look into writings of Friedrich Jürgenson concerning polyglot communication for more about that specifically. Speaking several languages himself, he claimed receiving direct messages from the spirit world in several different languages that he was familiar with, in the same EVP! With synchronicities galore, window dressing has even been applied to the ghost box technique itself to make it more appealing... ladies and gentlemen, I give you the "Estes Method," complete with its growing legion of believers who have forgotten to leave home without their cognitive bias, but somehow remembered to bring their blindfold and earphones.
I have to admit one of the most unexplainable EVPs ever captured by myself was using a Laser/Mic Receiver device that works by casting a laser against a reflective surface with that reflection captured on the receiving end. The modulation is the result of tiny vibrations in the beam that get converted to audio. During one investigation, I took an angled aim at an antique dresser/mirror over 100 years old. My recorder captured a somewhat clear, female, childlike voice seemed to be saying "what is that thing?" That was the only audio captured in that particular experiment and remains something I cannot explain to this day. While no historical data supported a deceased child at that location, there was one eyewitness report of a friend of that family that intrigued me. While outside in the yard, that person claimed to have noticed a little girl quickly peeking out the 2nd story window. I did not receive that bit of info until after the laser EVP capture and at that point in time I had not yet revealed my data to anyone.
I've also tried with numerous investigation attempts to capture sounds/verbalization with inductive microphones but never once captured anything of note. By design, it captures only electromagnetic vibrations only, not audio.
So much more goes into recording sound for data purposes. Air temperature, humidity, indoors vs outdoors, night vs day, inversions, room sizes, proximity to EM and GF fields and related recorder shielding, placement of multiple microphones and distance between them are but part of a long list of observations that should be included in audio collection. Adding to all of that are these facts:
Sound will radiate through a pipe without vibrating it. Objects like houses, automobiles, etc. have a frequency they will resonate at. Long-wave sound waves interact with the resonate frequencies of structures. The beams in a house can generate low frequency sound.
How do we explain the lack of any results from walking through an alleged haunted location during the day versus the night, or the lack of anything experienced from someone who has no fear of or knowledge about a location's alleged hauntings. Do ghosts require that we first dial-in our attention focused to them and acknowledge their presence prior to contact, not unlike receiving a call from the cell phone you are carrying? Human bias vs scientific results is the seemingly never-ending conflict arising in the quest for obtaining answers to the many paranormal questions. Too much is still unknown. I feel this 'devils advocate' quote covers it nicely:
"Human Bias is double-edged. Misinterpretation of what was observed have to be scrutinized as closely and as critically as must the testimony for the reality of the phenomena. There is likely to be just as much wishful thinking, prejudice, emotion, snap judgment, naiveté, and intellectual dishonesty on the side of orthodoxy, of skepticism, and of conservatism, as on the side of hunger for and of belief in the marvelous. The emotional motivation for irresponsible disbelief is, in fact, probably even stronger— especially in scientifically educated persons whose pride of knowledge is at stake—than is in other persons the motivation for irresponsible belief." (Ducasse 1958)
Upon your reading of this article, I may come off sounding like a non-believer in the paranormal, but I assure you that I am not. I simply do not live in a self-created, subjective reality that gives rise to a particular belief system, and am willing to entertain and explore the possibilities of the legitimacy of true strangeness and its associated hypotheses, instead of regurgitating worn-out, 'made-for-TV-entertainment' proof of the paranormal.
"Beyond a reasonable doubt..." be it Bigfoot, UFOs, ghosts, etc., ... does honest paranormal research deserve anything less than that?
- MoonJoey
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