EVP Tutorial

Aedryan Methyus · Posted: Aug Tue 21, 2007 3:33 pm Post subject: EVP Tutorial

Due to the large amount of questions we receive about capturing EVP's, I decided to put a tutorial together that we can refer our visitors to, instead of having to give the same answers to the same questions over and over. I plan on writing an in-depth article on EVP's in the future, but for now I will just cover the basics.

Here are some of the most common questions & answers:

- "What are EVP's?"

Electronic voice phenomena (EVP) are speech or speech-like sounds that occur on electronic devices, but are not heard in the environment at the time they are recorded, and thought by some to be of paranormal origin. The term itself was coined by publishing company Colin Smythe Ltd in the early 1970s. Previously the term “Raudive Voices”, after Dr. Konstantin Raudive whose 1970 book Breakthrough brought the subject to a wider public audience, was used.

Normal hypotheses designed to explain EVP include ordinary sounds mistaken as voices, flaws in the recording devices which produce voice-like sounds, and radio frequency contamination. Paranormal hypotheses include psychic echoes from the past, psychokinesis unconsciously produced by living people, thoughts of spirits, and in rare instances, thoughts of aliens or nature spirits. EVP are a subset of Instrumental TransCommunication which also includes visual anomalies.

EVP are typically short, usually the length of a word or short phrase. Paranormal investigators use EVP as a tool for such purposes as haunting investigations, and contacting the souls of loved ones. The basis in fact for these uses are anecdotal and not necessarily scientifically supported. Most investigation of EVP has been conducted by people with few academic credentials, and the scientific literature regarding EVP is very sparse.

History And Investigation

There is an urban legend that American inventor Thomas Edison was the first EVP researcher. In the 1920s, he told a reporter with Scientific American that he was working on a machine that could contact the dead, and the story was printed in many newspapers. A few years later, Edison announced that he had been making a joke at the reporter's expense, and that he had not been working on such a device. Though Edison did not attempt to create such a device, others have attempted to do so.

Attila von Szalay (Sealay) was among the first to definitively claim to have recorded the voices of the dead. Working with Raymond Bayless, von Szalay conducted a number of 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. Von Szalay and Bayless' work was published by the Journal of the American Society for Psychical Research in 1959.[6] in 1959. Bayless later went on to co-author the 1979 book, Phone Calls From the Dead.

In 1959 Swedish film producer Friedrich Jürgenson captured, while recording bird songs, what he said was the discarnate voice of a man speaking Norwegian. He went on to make many more recordings, including one that he said contained a message from his late mother.

Latvian psychologist Konstantin Raudive, who worked in conjunction with Jürgenson, made over 100,000 similarly natured recordings some in a RF-screened laboratory and some containing what are believed by proponents to be identifiable words. In an attempt to confirm the content of his collection of recordings, Raudive invited listeners to hear and interpret them. Raudive believed that the clarity of the voices heard in his recordings implied that they could not be readily explained by normal means.

Since their release, Raudive's interpretations of his recordings have been criticized as being highly subjective, and for the fact that the speech they are said to contain is often unrelated to questions that investigators posed during their recording. Both Jürgenson and Raudive's recordings were said to contain sentences that were made up of several languages.

In 1980, William O'Neil constructed an electronic audio device called "The Spiricom". O'Neil said the device was built to specifications which he received psychically from Dr. George Mueller, a scientist who had died six years previously. At a Washington, DC, press conference on April 6, 1982, O'Neil said that he was able to hold two-way conversations with spirits through the Spiricom device, and provided the design specifications to researchers for free. However, nobody is known to have replicated O'Neil's results using their own Spiricom devices. O'Neil's partner, retired industrialist George Meek, attributed O'Neil's success, and the inability of others to replicate it, to O'Neil's "psychic abilities" forming part of the loop that made the system work.

In 1982, Sarah Estep founded the American Association of Electronic Voice Phenomena in Severna Park, Maryland, a nonprofit organization with the purpose of increasing awareness of EVP, and of teaching standardized methods for capturing it. Estep began her exploration of EVP in 1976, and says she has made hundreds of recordings of messages from deceased friends, relatives, and other individuals, including Konstantin Raudive, Beethoven, a lamplighter from 18th century Philadelphia, PA, and extraterrestrials whom she speculated originated from other planets or dimensions.

In 1997, Imants Barušs, of the Department of Psychology at the University of Western Ontario, conducted a series of experiments using the methods of EVP investigator Konstantin Raudive, and the work of Instrumental Transcommunication (ITC) researcher Mark Macy, as a guide. A radio was tuned to an empty frequency, and over 81 sessions a total of 60 hours and 11 minutes of recordings were collected. During recordings, a researcher either sat in silence or attempted to make verbal contact with potential sources of EVP. Barušs did record several events that sounded like voices, but they were too few and too random to represent viable data and too open to interpretation to be described definitively as EVP. He concluded: "While we did replicate EVP in the weak sense of finding voices on audio tapes, none of the phenomena found in our study was clearly anomalous, let alone attributable to discarnate beings. Hence we have failed to replicate EVP in the strong sense." The findings were published in the Journal of Scientific Exploration in 2001, and include a literature survey.

In 2005 the Journal of the Society for Psychical Research in 2005 published a report by paranormal investigator Alexander MacRae. MacRae conducted recording sessions using a device of MacRae's design known as ALPHA. MacRae reported that ALPHA is able to convert electrodermal responses into noise, which is then examined for EVP. In an attempt to demonstrate that different individuals would interpret EVP in the recordings the same way, MacRae asked seven people to compare some selections to a list of five phrases he provided and choose the best match. He concluded that the selections were not a form of audible Rorschach, but genuine voices whose origins could not be explained through conventional means.

- "What kind of recorder should I use?"

It doesn't take anything special. Any old cassette recorder with an external mic will work. For the sake of simplicity, convenience and quality however, I highly recommend digital audio recorders. Personally, I use an Olympus VN480-PC and I highly recommend it. It can record up to 480 minutes of audio without ever missing a beat and it plugs right into a USB port, which makes transferring your audio on to your PC for analyzing, a snap. I paid $100.00 for mine at Radio Shack, but I recently discovered that quite a few people on Ebay are blowing out refurbished ones for like $30.00 or something. Can't beat that!

Either way, just be sure to turn off the voice activated feature, if whatever recorder you use has it. Otherwise, you will probably miss a lot of EVP's. For analyzing and enhancing your EVP's, I can't recommend Cool Edit Pro enough!

- "I don't have a recorder. Is there any other way to capture EVP's?"

Yes. If you don't have any kind of recorder, you can record audio directly onto your computer, but it will use up a lot of hard drive space. Any sort of audio software and a PC mic will work fine. Personally, I use and highly recommend Cool Edit Pro for analyzing, discerning and enhancing EVP's. Here is a link where you can download audio software called "EVP Maker", which was essentially designed for capturing and editing EVP's on your computer:

EVP Maker

EVP Maker is very basic and extremely easy to use for capturing and enhancing your EVP's. Just keep an eye on how much hard drive space you're using up! It should be fine though if you just capture a couple hours of audio at a time.

Protocols For Capturing EVP's:

It is VERY important that you ALWAYS follow strict EVP protocol during your sessions, in order to insure the authenticity of your recordings. Here is a list of some of the most important protocols:

- Make sure your sessions are in a quiet, controlled environment, with no TV's or radios going and no one else in any other rooms of the house while you're recording.

- Always verbally state the exact time and date as soon as you start recording.

- Always speak in a loud, clear voice.

- No whispering! If anyone present accidentally whispers or makes ANY sort of wierd sound (clearing their throat, coughing, sniffing, mumbling, making the floor creak, noisy clothing rubbing together, etc), EVERYONE present must verbally state that "so and so just made a noise", so you'll know what it was when you go back and review your audio.

- Be EXTRA careful and aware of noises if you are recording audio in a populated area, such as an apartment building with close neighbors or in a noisy neighborhood.

- Always use an external microphone and keep it as far away from the recorder as possible when using a tape recorder.

- If you are recording at home I don't recommend just letting the recorder run while you're sleeping or not home, etc, because you could never be certain that it wasn't a human's voice.

- Though it's not absolutely necessary, I think it's always best to "call out" and ask questions during your sessions, ie; "Are there any spirits present?", "Can you tell me your name", "When did you die?", "How did you die?", "Why are you here?", "Is there anything we can do to help you?"etc, etc, etc. Actual direct communication doesn't seem to happen very often, but we have gotten them.

- If your recorder has a voice activation feature, always leave it off during your sessions.

- Recording audio next to running water (creeks, streams, etc) is a waste of time. Aside from being completely annoying while reviewing the audio, the ambient noise is so loud that you probably wouldn't even hear the EVP's if you did capture them.

Chances are, if you review your recordings thoroughly, you will probably find EVP's within a couple of two or three hour long sessions. However, at this point, I can't say for sure that EVP's can definitely be captured anywhere/anytime. This is mainly because we usually do not return for follow up investigations at areas, where we did not capture any sort of compelling evidence. All I can say at this point is, locations where we have captured other types of evidence seem to consistently produce EVP's on return visits. Other locations where no other evidence was captured usually don't seem to produce any EVP's during the initial investigation. I am almost compelled to say that EVP's may actually be a good indicator, as to whether or not a given location may have spirit activity, but I don't have any supportive evidence of that at this time. My advice is to just record as much audio as you can. The longer your sessions, the better your chances probably are of capturing EVP's....

Reviewing Audio

There are a lot of different things you can do while reviewing your recordings. I usually review the whole recording 2 - 3 times (that part sucks!). The first time, I usually just plug headphones into my recorder while i'm either just kickin' back or surfing the net, etc. I keep a pen and a piece of paper handy and take notes as I listen. If I hear a possible EVP, I write down the time that is displayed on the counter, along with any initial possible translations, so I can find it later.

After i've listened to the whole recording, I will transfer the audio on to my PC (only if EVP's were captured) and do the following:

- Open the audio files(s) up in Cool Edit Pro.

- Locate each of the possible EVP's that I took notes on. Please note that they won't be in the same location as indicated by your recorder's counter. I'm not sure exactly why that is, but I assume it has something to do with the speed you recorded at in comparison to the speed at which you are reviewing it. At any rate, once you figure out how much further ahead/behind your software's counter is for the first one, it will make it a lot easier to find the rest of them.

- The first thing I will usually do then is, try to discern each of the EVP's that I took note of. There are a number of different things you can do. I usually start by amplifying the EVP. How much amplification depends on how much background/white noise there is in your recording. Just start out by boosting it about 6dB and go from there.

- Aside from amplification, you can try slowing it down, speeding it up, try adding equalization and/or reverb, noise reduction, try lowering/raising the pitch. Basically just do whatever you have to do to figure out what is being said.

One of the wierdest things about EVP's is, how they almost always sound like one thing is being said then the next time you listen to it, it sounds like something else. It's almost as if the same voice was saying multiple phrases, all at the same time and all of the phrases were combined into a single phrase. Sometimes it takes A LOT of tweaking and enhancing to derive at the most probable translation. Sometimes it is best to just take a break and move on to the next one, because your ears can become fatigued, just like writing/learning music.

I recommend taking a look at my EVP classification at the following link for other possible types of EVP's you may encounter:

Universal EVP Classification System

It's not a perfect system yet by any means, but I do feel that it is presently the most useful and descriptive EVP classification system out there. I still have a lot of great ideas for it and I can pretty much assure you that it will evolve into a compelling means of scientifically categorizing and rating electronic voice phenomenon.

- Pay close attention to the parts of your recordings where people were talking. We have found many times, where "they"? seem to manipulate our vocal chords and cause our our voices to "morph". By that I mean, someone will say something, but when we play it back something entirely different is heard. Many times it will even be a different voice altogether....

- After I have discerned each EVP to the best of my ability, I usually save an enhanced version and a raw version for comparison. I usually save them as mp3's for sharing on the web, because the file sizes are smaller.

PLEASE NOTE: I highly recommend downloading a "Time Calculator" in order to calculate the exact times each EVP was obtained. It will save you A LOT of trouble. Either way, ALWAYS keep notes for the exact time each EVP was captured, along with the date. You can usually download them for free. Just do a search on your favorite search engine. In order to calculate the exact time each EVP was captured, you'll have to calculate how many hours/minutes/seconds from the time you started recording.

After you have saved all of your EVP's, it is best to go back through and listen to the entire audio recording one more time amplified just to make sure you didn't miss any. Once you have thoroughly reviewed the audio, make sure the whole recording is backed up in WAV format for future reference.

That should pretty much cover most of the basics for now. Keep an eye out on our main site for an in-depth/slightly more scientific report on EVP's in the future.

- Aedryan
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butterfly39 · Posted: Aug Thu 23, 2007 8:13 am Post subject:

Thanks for the tutorial, aedryan. I'm seriously thinking about trying a few evps. Hope this isn't a redundant question, but can i just do them anywhere. Or is it better to take them in a place that has been documented as haunted? Save that question for tomorrow nights chat, okay?

butterfly

Aedryan Methyus · Posted: Aug Thu 23, 2007 11:05 am Post subject:

I already answered that question to the best of my ability in the tutorial actually....
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butterfly39 · Posted: Aug Thu 23, 2007 3:35 pm Post subject:

Then i must have skipped a paragraph Embarassed

or i'm blind as a damn bat. Will give it another looksy then. sorry...

butterfly39 · Posted: Aug Fri 24, 2007 7:39 am Post subject:

unless i'm an idiot. Confused

(Be gentle with me here. I'm so new to the ghosthunting, so it might take a while to sink in--even when it's right there in front of my eyes. I never realized how much goes into it all.)

Your saying it doesn't matter where I take evp's. As long as I have the proper equipment and follow your suggestions and avoid the pitfalls listed in tutorial (Running water and so forth), and the conditions are right. and That I shouldn't waste my time on locations that aren't successful the first time around.

I really want to try taking one, and if i'm successful, i hope i can get it on the site. We'll see. I'm still computer dumb to some extent Laughing

Aedryan Methyus · Posted: Aug Fri 24, 2007 11:39 am Post subject:

I didn't say to not return to places where you were unsuccessful. I just said that we usually don't. I think it's a good idea to do 2 or 3 investigations at every location actually (with EVP's especially). That way you could compare data from each investigation.

Basically what I meant was, I am almost compelled to say that whether or not EVP's are obtained at a given location could possibly be a good indicator, as to whether or not a given area has any ghost activity. But, since we usually don't return to areas where EVP's weren't obtained during the first investigation, we don't have any supportive evidence to backup the theory.

What would be great is, if several groups could take part in an study by taking turns having EVP sessions at two different locations on the same nights at the same times for a 30 day period. One of the locations would be an EVP hot spot and the other would be a location where EVP's were never obtained during an investigation(s). A graph system would be used to chart out all of the EVP's, dates, times, weather data, etc for comparison. Imagine the amount of information that would be learned! Shocked

The most difficult part would be authenticating every investigator's evidence (or lack thereof for that matter). But, in my opinion, THAT is the kind of rigorous scientific data that needs to be being collected for comparison, in order to actually move ghost study forward. But, as it is, ghost study is at a complete stand still. We're basically like a bunch of rats running around, lost in a maze....

- Aedryan
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butterfly39 · Posted: Aug Fri 24, 2007 7:58 pm Post subject:

how do you know what's a hot spot. Or do you mean after you've taken a successful evp, and that's considered the hotspot? Am I confusing you yet? Laughing

My daughter and her friends are into the ghost hunting. I could recruit them when i'm ready to try, so there will be two groups in two different places. I'll let you know when it happens. Hopefully, we'll get something. She might already have some of the equipment your talking about, too. one can only hope.

em · Posted: Aug Sun 26, 2007 7:10 pm Post subject:

Aedryan,

Have you ever suggested that "EVP TEST" with any other Ghost hunters?? Humm i just think you are on to something there.......I mean if it was for proof of the paranormal then one would think there would be at least a few people willing to help collect the data!!

Also another quick question, Have you ever caught a EVP that was truly out of this world?? I mean like you know 100% that it can't be explained!! (like a FAV one or something)

Em

Aedryan Methyus · Posted: Aug Mon 27, 2007 12:00 am Post subject:

em · Posted: Aug Mon 27, 2007 12:06 am Post subject:

May i ask as to why we crack you up??? LOL

I mean i am not complaining i would rather make you laugh then...piss ya off!!! LOL

Em

Aedryan Methyus · Posted: Aug Mon 27, 2007 12:26 am Post subject:

em · Posted: Aug Mon 27, 2007 12:27 am Post subject:

Hahahahahahahahahahaha!!!!!!!!!!

Now that would be completely true if i forget to take my meds.......LOL!!!

Em!!

madcow · Ghost Hunting Enthusiast Joined: 01 Jan 2007 Posts: 151

Aedryan,

Can you list any Erie (not Eerie) hotspots that the general public can access?
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I wasn't mad until I got a belly full of Erie politics

jacob. · Curious About Ghosts Joined: 28 Aug 2007 Posts: 8

Thanks for the tutorial.

Next time I go to Tinkers Creek, I'm going to record our ouija board session on audio and take some pictures.

Hopefully I'll get some good results.

Aedryan Methyus · Posted: Aug Wed 29, 2007 5:20 pm Post subject: