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FAQ Frequently Asked Questions EVP/ITC Techniques
Question: Someone ‘cleaned up’ an EVP and it doesn't sound the same as the original; isn’t this a problem?
Answer: The problem is that these voices are not formed the same way your voice is formed. Your voice begins with the vibration of your vocal cord. The resulting sound is then channeled through your mouth, and on the way, frequency components are formed, enhanced or suppressed by the changing shape of your mouth and then spewed out into the world as a word. Voice researchers call the vocal cord frequency "Formant 0," and the subsequent harmonics , "Formant 1," "2" and so on. A spoken word is recognized because we have learned since childhood to look for particular relationships of formants to detect the word. Training is a cultural thing, and some do not do as well detecting the same word when it is spoken by someone from a different culture because the formants are arranged in slightly different, unfamiliar ways. In EVP, research has shown that the voice is formed of a fortuitous collection of available sounds and that there is seldom a Formant 0, or if one is present, it may be fragmented. In effect, the words are being pronounced by someone from an unfamiliar culture. This is true even if it is a loved one because that person is obliged to use whatever sounds are available. That is why we talk about people needing to train themselves to hear the words in EVP, and why a perfectly clear Class A to you might sound like loud noise to someone else. However, once you tell the listener what to look for, that noise will often become obviously the words you said they were. Online blinded listening tests have been conducted with what we consider excellent quality EVP, yet the average website visitor was only able to correctly identify 25% of the words we think are present in the examples. See the Online Listening Trials report. Assuming the words in EVP are being formed of available frequencies, then a word might have been formed with a few relatively low frequency bits of sound and a few relatively high bits, compared to how you would form the word with your mouth. When a word spoken by you is "cleaned up", its meaning remains unchanged because the frequencies are all grouped as harmonics of F0. However, when the same word spoken in EVP is cleaned up, it is possible to remove the relatively low frequency components, while the remaining high frequency components are not sufficient by themselves to form the word. We always caution against too much processing of the EVP for this reason. A second problem you might run into is how different sound reproduction systems (i.e. different computers) will affect the reproduction of a word in EVP. As a rule of thumb, we recommend that any processing you do, once you have decided what is said, you should be able to restore the file to its original form and hear that message. if not, then give up on the recording.
I was wondering how the ITC/EVP arena views apophenia or pareidolia as a science or if in ITC research allowances are made for these psychological observations. Can ITC research and apophenia and its subsets coexist? Do your researchers take pareidolia into consideration when determining an ITC event? If not, why? If yes, how do you separate the two by definition?
There can be no doubt that some reported EVP are mundane sounds mistaken as a paranormal voice. Pareidolia is a real enough phenomena that we naturally must deal with at all times, just as we deal with apophenia which is the visual form. Part of the dogma of those terms is that human brains are hardwired to recognize voices or faces in noise; so much so that we find these things even when they are not there. In deer hunting, they call that "buck fever." However, later research shows that this assumption has been greatly overstated. As it turns out, the mind has a pattern recognition center that is trained to recognize faces from cultural upbringing, just as we are trained to find understandable words in sounds that would be gibberish for someone from a different culture. Those same centers can be trained to recognize any pattern, showing us that we should as easily find a favorite song in random audio noise or maybe a favorite movie star in visual noise.
In fact, we do find this in situations where people are relaxed, and there is a relatively steady-state noise in the environment, such as a refrigerator fan or heater fan. Many people report "almost" hearing a distant conversation or radio station. They even report almost hearing music. We think that EVP are formed by a physical process known as stochastic resonance. In that process, a weak signal will act as a seed signal to be amplified in a field of broad-spectrum noise. The weak signal emerges as a pattern energetically stronger than the field of energy and recognizably the same signal. Thus, a weak telekinetic signal might be amplified by the noise we use in audio phenomena and visual phenomena. Our thought is that the neuro-electric field in the brain might act on the broad-spectrum energy from the fan to allow familiar or expected hearing or seeing. We do not consider such faces in clouds or voices in fans to be ITC and such reports fall way outside of the usual characteristics of EVP or visual ITC. (I have attached a document that has a list of characteristics.)
There is also a very real problem with stray radio signals producing "unexpected voices in recording media." Since we use mostly digital recorders, and the majority of RF these days is digital, RF contamination is less of a problem than it was a few years back. On the other hand, hand-held digital voice recorders are excellent antennas and there is not much of an effort to eliminate the antenna effect in their design. EVP has been successfully recorded in mil-spec screen rooms. Armatures can do the same experiment by nesting metal containers with their digital recorder isolated in the center. See Eliminating Radio Frequency Contamination
A common problem is the recording of unnoticed people talking in the area. This is especially a problem in field recording when a ghost hunting crew is at work. The very first Best Practice we proposed was the use of a control recorder of higher quality, such as a video camera. EVP seldom forms in higher quality recording circuits. Also, we have no record of the identical EVP showing up at the exact same time in more than one recording process. These two characteristics enable us to say that it is reasonable to discard an utterance that is found in more than one recording unless there are extenuating circumstances. See Using a Second or Control Audio Recorder as a Means of Identifying Mundane Sounds
So yes, we are aware of these things. They are real and techniques must be designed to account for them. A problem though is that anyone can attempt to collect examples of these phenomena, yet few are well-trained in the subject. For instance, orbs found in photographs are almost always particulates illuminated by the camera flash or light reflecting from a bright surface. Yet, people persist in thinking that orbs are etheric entities, such as the local ghost. The difficulty is that there is some evidence indicating that some orbs are phenomenal, and unless the orb is clearly in motion, there is no current technique for distinguishing reflected light from a self-luminous orb.
Research can be designed to expand our understanding. For instance, we have conducted double-blind experiments to determine whether or not a person can use EVP to collect information that is unknown to the experimenter. See 4Cell EVP Demonstration. The 4Cell results were in the range of 60% correct responses.
We have conducted two online EVP listening trials that showed "average" people can correctly understand about 34% of the words in EVP. A very experienced person would have heard more like 100%, and the difference between the website visitors and an AA-EVP member is about 40% word recognition. (there is an apples and oranges problem with the way this figure was arrived at, but it agrees with observations.) We are still seeking "peer review" of the article, but the report at Online Listening Trials shows that EVP contain real words but that the words are formed in a novel way that requires training to be understood--much like learning a new language.
So, I would say that we are developing a good
foundation of research that will enable us to
properly study these phenomena. When speaking to
a participant in the Big Circle (see the video
by clicking on the image below), we do not ask
for scientific proof, but when we are talking to
just about everyone else, we require good reason
to accept the example of phenomena. You will see
that there are a lot of people who make claims
that cannot be supported with good research, but
I must say that it is the responsibility of the
listener to recognize the difference between a
person trained in the field and an amateur
before concluding that all of
these phenomena are imaginary. This is also true
of what scientists say about EVP. Are they
qualified?
Question: What should I do to begin recording EVP
Question: How do I make a ghost go away?
Answer: Many people train for years to learn how to be sensitive to the presence of discarnate people. In some cases, we have found that the "intrusive" entity was a loved one. So it is all a matter of perspective.
One of the problems is that they are pretty much always around, so ignoring them is a matter of ignoring your senses. That usually takes training as well. You might look around for a Spiritualist church. Spiritualists train to be in charge of their world and their contacts with the other side. That means they do not put up with misbehaving people, and they do that by explaining to them that they need to behave or go away. They do this with strong intention, not anger. For instance, if you are going to chop a block of wood, you would not just lay the ax on the wood and hope gravity does the rest. You would swing the ax with the intention of cutting the wood, without anger and with the expectation that it will be cut.
Ignoring subtle influences is a lot like not thinking of a pink elephant. The better approach is to express intention and then behave accordingly, as if your intention has been met.
Keep in mind that beseeching the unseen to go away, "clearing" the house or any of those New Age tricks intended to make ghosts go away, tend to give them the energy they need to cause etheric-to-physical influences. This is true because your fear or strong concern brings just the kind of energy needed to cause the influence in the first place--the pink elephant problem. Our minds tend to make our fears real, but in more specific terms, our minds tend to enable our expectation. Expect what you want and not what you fear.
Question: Will my camera work for capturing images?
Answer: Photographic phenomena comes in all sorts of ways. The Directors have decided to ignore stationary optical orbs as probable light reflected from particulates or shiny objects. The problem is that probably 99.99% of photographic orbs (if not more) are just that and we know of no way of telling the difference between something phenomenal and an artifact.
There are examples of moving orbs that are very interesting to the Butlers. One thing is that they can be studied and it is usually possible to tell the difference between them and an artifact. See Photographic ITC and Spirit Photography: Orbs.
There is also visual Instrumental TransCommunication (ITC), which is usually the transformation of available optical energy to phenomenal features. This is sometimes considered communication.
The chaotic, bright light in photographic orbs sometimes have apparent faces and such, but what is thought to be happening is that optical noise is opportunistically used for feature formation as in visual ITC. Since our distance and time is apparently irrelevant to the etheric communicators, there is no empirically known reason to think that the face belongs to a local ghost.
We have found that technology issues, such as analog verses digital, have a lot to do with what equipment is best for Visual ITC. Also, several examples of the same make and model might produce several different results. In the end, we have to recommend that the person experiments with what is available to begin with.
More important than the camera is how well informed the cameraperson has become. For instance, if you were actually asking if your camera is good for collecting orbs, we would have to ask you to look elsewhere for the answer. As far as we are concerned, orbs are artifacts until someone provides experimental evidence which has been submitted to peer review.
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