Electronic Voice Phenomena – EVP

Electronic Voice PhenomenaElectronic Voice Phenomena – EVP

Electronic Voice Phenomena (hereby called “EVP”) are voices or sounds or voices, often of an intelligent nature that responds to human questions or discussions that can form on all manner of recording media.

First heard on phonograph recordings of the 19th century, the “formal” discovery of EVP began to first appear in the 1940s and . An article on EVP on Wikipedia describes these first forrays into the new territory of electronic spirit communications:

American photographer Attila von Szalay was among the first to try recording what he believed to be voices of the dead as a way to augment his investigations in photographing ghosts. He began his attempts in 1941 using a 78 rpm record, but it wasn’t until 1956 — after switching to a reel-to-reel tape recorder — that he believed he was successful. Working with Raymond Bayless, von Szalay conducted several recording sessions with a custom-made apparatus, consisting of a microphone in an insulated cabinet connected to an external recording device and speaker. Szalay reported finding many sounds on the tape that could not be heard on the speaker at the time of recording, some of which were recorded when there was no one in the cabinet. He believed these sounds to be the voices of discarnate spirits. Among the first recordings believed to be spirit voices were such messages as “This is G!”, “Hot dog, Art!”, and “Merry Christmas and Happy New Year to you all”. Von Szalay and Raymond Bayless’s work was published by the Journal of the American Society for Psychical Research in 1959.  Bayless later went on to co-author the 1979 book, “Phone Calls From the Dead” and “Apparitions and Survival of Death” in 1973. His co-author and frequent collaborator Scott Rigo also authored his own books on life after death. Scott was found murdered in 1990 in his home and the case remains technically unsolved to this day.

In 1959, Swedish painter and film producer Friedrich Jürgenson was recording bird songs. Upon playing the tape later, he heard what he interpreted to be his dead father’s voice and then the spirit of his deceased wife calling his name. He went on to make several more recordings, including one that he said contained a message from his late mother.”

Juergenson described hearing his mother’s voice saying in German, “Friedrich, you are being watched. Friedel, my little Friedel, can you hear me?” Juergenson  went on to record  recording of hundreds of EVP voices and gained considerable notice because of his work. Juergenson  went on to write several books on EVPs: “Voice Transmissions With The Deceased“, “Voices from the Universe” and “Radio Contact with the Dead.”

Friedrich Jürgenson playing some early capture EVPs – Note this is in German.

The earliest that EVPs were possibly recorded were when Attila von Szalay began recording EVP on phonograph records in 1936. Per the website liveabout.com:

American photographer Attila von Szalay’s began his attempts to capture spirit voices using a 78-RPM Pack-Bell record-cutter and player either in the late 1930s or early 1940s. While Szalay’s early efforts were not very successful, he continued his experiments, teaming up with psychologist Raymond Bayless in the early 1950s using a device that Bayless had devised and constructed with much better results.”

Another passage in liveabout.com shared this interesting account from two Catholic priests:

In 1952, Two Catholic priests, Father Ernetti and Father Gemelli, inadvertently picked up EVP while recording Gregorian chants on a reel-to-reel tape recorder called a Magnétophone. When the wire on the machine kept breaking, Father Gemelli looked to heavens and asked his dead father for help. To the shock of both men, his father’s voice was later heard on the recording saying, “Of course I shall help you. I’m always with you.” Further experiments confirmed the phenomenon.

Enter Dr. Konstantin Raudive who began his research in response to Juergenson’s pioneer work:

In 1967, Juergenson’s Radio Contact with the Dead was translated into German, and Latvian psychologist Dr. Konstantin Raudive read it skeptically. He visited Juergenson to learn his methodology, decided to experiment on his own, and soon began developing his own experimental techniques.

Like Juergenson, Raudive too heard the voice of his own deceased mother, who called him by his boyhood name:

“Kostulit, this is your mother.”

Eventually he catalogued tens of thousands of voices, many under strict laboratory conditions.

He published his book, Unhoerbares Wird Hoerbar (The Inaudible Becomes Audible), based on 72,000 voices he recorded.

In 1971, the chief engineers of Pye Records Ltd. decided to do a controlled experiment with Raudive. They invited him to their sound lab and installed special equipment to block out any radio and television signals. They would not allow Raudive to touch any of the equipment.

Raudive used one tape recorder which was monitored by a control tape recorder. All he could do was speak into a microphone. They taped Raudive’s voice for eighteen minutes and none of the experimenters heard any other sounds. But when the scientists played back the tape, to their amazement, they heard over two hundred voices recorded on tape.” – Source: bibliotecapleyades.net.

It is notable that Raudive was captivated by the voices up to the point of his passing and many researchers have claimed that he works now on the Other Side to initiate communications with them to the present day!

It is likely that there was a developing awareness in the early 20th century that these voices were being captured on primitive radio and recording equipment and thus this prompted the early research in the subject. This is purely my own conjecture and is not based on anything but this supposition. However, SOMETHING was stimulating people to try to develop techniques to record these voices so I do not feel my theory is all that far off the mark.

My broadcast method of EVP on SoulStream

I began doing on-air EVP years ago and frankly was feeling my way through it with no real theoretical understanding of exactly what was going on. Frankly, I just trusted my gut feel and “went for it” when I found something that worked.

The gear I used broke down into two distinct types:

A “Shack-hack” radio with frequency scan on AM or FM with recording to Audacity to sample answers to questions. I would then seek answers by processing the EVP live, often by increasing the volume in the recording with the compression filter with or without peaks and also by then sampling the noise and then using the noise reduction filter to bring out the voices. This was by far the most common method and yielded the best results. In reality, it was called “transform EVP” although I didn’t know the the proper term at the time. The “AtransC” website (formally called “AAEVP”) has a lot of the more formal definitions of how and why EVPs form as well as a “how-to” section. In my view, AtransC is the world nexus for all things EVP and worth visiting often. See the links later in this article.

The second type of broadcast method used the Ovilus as a background device, leaving it on as I broadcast and letting me speak and do readings with the occasional input from the Ovilus. Technically this is not EVP. It is the use of a device to share a word from a library of spoken words on the Ovilus. However, there is a mode on many Ovilus devices that allow “babble” to be produced from common phonetic sounds and allows the listener to hear potential “words” formed from the random babbling of the Ovilus.

Years later and with more understanding of what I was working with and how it worked, I am returning to these methods on the show with the emphasis on the former method of utilizing both static noise and radio-sweep as the energetic source for Spirits to use to impress EVPs into the recordings we make.

I do have a couple of old-fashioned tape recorders I plan to make use of on the show as well in order to test EVPs with physical tape as the recording medium.

Links

Devices for EVP