Electronic Voice Phenomena

[Marat]

Electronic voice phenomena are sounds which appear to be human voices, sometimes thought to be those of dead people known to the listeners, which can be heard on any sort of sound recording device. If a tape recorder is run where there are no sounds or voices, voices can sometimes be heard when the blank tape is played back. Similar voices have been reported from radios tuned to a frequency on which nothing is being broadcast or from televisions turned to an empty channel. These apparent voices have been heard from sound recording devices which were allowed to record and play back in a room within a Faraday cage, so the possibility of stray transmissions from other signal sources can be ruled out.

 

However, it is possible that the recording devices themselves are producing noise which the human ear is able to interpret as voices, such as from static or over-amplification of the signal. Since these voices seem to manifest specifically from the recording device and are not heard in the room during recording, there would be no way to correct for this effect by trying to pick up the voices from several different devices used in the same place at the same time.

 

Although I have tried experiments with this phenomenon and have occasionally picked up 'voices' which were quite clear and required no interpretation to determine what was being said or that they were 'human,' I don't profess to know what they are or whether they are just some innocuous electrical phenomenon produced by the sound recording machine itself. There was a Ph.D. thesis on this phenomenon started at Cambridge University in 1982, but it was stopped because background noises could not be sufficiently screened off to make it worthwhile to continue experimenting -- though this seems an easily correctable problem. Although tape recordings can be analyzed to determine whether the sound on them is produced by a human voice, so far as I know no one has ever subjected this phenomenon to that test.

 

Can anyone suggest a decisive experiment which would clearly establish whether these 'voices' are artifacts of the recording machinery or something independent of it?

[insane_alien]

your brain has been searching for human voice patterns in the environment for your whole life, including while you were in the uterus.

 

if you are searching hard enough for a pattern in random noise you'll eventually find it.

 

its the same phenomenon as when people see jesus in a pop-tart or the virgin mary on a wooden door.

 

brains like patterns. if they can't find any then they tend to make their own.

[Moontanman]

Have you ever been at the beach when seagulls were feeding and flying all around? If you listen, you can often hear words, even short phrases, in the almost white noise of their squawking. It's just your brain hooking random noises together into something familar....

[Marat]

While I agree that the human mind is predisposed to find familiar patterns and thus discern messages even where there are none, if you've ever actually listened to a lot of electronic voice phenomena you will find that there are some sounds which it would be positively perverse to characterize as the result of strained interpretations. They sound as emphatic, loud, and clear as any normal human speech. If anything, they often sound overly emphatic, more like words spoken in an elocution lesson than natural human speech.

 

Konstantin Raudive, one of the early researchers in this field, knew a number of different languages, and I always suspected that his inclination to 'hear' voices first in Estonian, then in Polish, and then in Finnish merely represented his ability to switch from one language to another to force random sounds to match with meaningful sounds in some language. So no doubt some of what is asserted to be evidence of electronic voice phenomena is just random noise interpreted into artificial congruence with genuine language. It might be an interesting test, however, to determine if the voices heard are usually those of the native language where they are heard or not, since no one knows where they are coming from.

 

A lot of what I have heard has been spoken in the same clipped, mechanical, robotic tone, which almost sounds like someone trying to imitate an artificial speech machine, which I suppose some enthusiasts would interpret as evidence that these voices really come from alien beings on another planet who are unable accurately to imitate human speech. I have also often heard human laughter, which as you can imagine doesn't sound like anything that random electronic noise would produce.

 

In short, the sounds are just too articulate to dismiss as forced interpretations of random signals, like faces seen in clouds, for example. What has to be done is to clarify how they are being produced is to find some way to prove that they have the sound wave characteristics of human voices rather than of background static, amplification phenomena, or some electromagnetic epiphenomena. I think having professional sound engineers interpret the sound wave characteristics of tape recordings of these voices would help resolve this question.

 

I suspect that everything which enthusiasts of electronic voice phenomena have suggested as an explanation -- that these are voices of the spirits of the dead, projected voices from the minds of those listening, or the voices of alien beings from other planets -- is wrong, since it seems just to force this unknown phenomenon to match up with something already existing in popular mythology, which has no independent proof of its reality. No doubt the real explanation of this interesting mystery will have to be specific to the electronic voice phenomenon itself.

 

In the meantime, why not experiment for yourself! All you need is a tape recorder and a Faraday cage to get a reasonably interference-free recording. You may be surprsed at what you hear.