Electronic voice phenomenon
Scientists regard EVP as a form of auditory pareidolia (interpreting random sounds as voices in one's own language) and a pseudoscience promulgated by popular culture.
Spiritualism declined in the latter part of the 20th century, but attempts to use portable recording devices and modern digital technologies to communicate with spirits continued.
[10] Konstantin Raudive, a Latvian psychologist who had taught at Uppsala University, Sweden, and who had worked in conjunction with Jürgenson, made over 100,000 recordings which he described as being communications with discarnate people.
[7]: 352–381 [13] At a Washington, DC press conference on April 6, 1982, O'Neil stated that he was able to hold two-way conversations with spirits through the Spiricom device, and provided the design specifications to researchers for free.
The device is described as a combination white noise generator and AM radio receiver modified to sweep back and forth through the AM band selecting split-second snippets of sound.
Critics of the device say its effect is subjective and incapable of being replicated, and since it relies on radio noise, any meaningful response a user gets is purely coincidental, or simply the result of pareidolia.
[19] In 1982, Sarah Estep founded the American Association of Electronic Voice Phenomena (AA-EVP) in Severna Park, Maryland, a nonprofit organization with the purpose of increasing awareness of EVP, and of teaching standardized methods for capturing it.
[20] Estep began her exploration of EVP in 1976, and says she has made hundreds of recordings of messages from deceased friends, relatives, and extraterrestrials whom she speculated originated from other planets or dimensions.
[21] The term Instrumental Trans-Communication (ITC) was coined by Ernst Senkowski in the 1970s to refer more generally to communication through any sort of electronic device such as tape recorders, fax machines, television sets or computers between spirits or other discarnate entities and the living.
[13][22] One particularly famous claimed incidence of ITC occurred when the image of EVP enthusiast Friedrich Jürgenson (whose funeral was held that day) was said to have appeared on a television in the home of a colleague, which had been purposefully tuned to a vacant channel.
[23][24] In 1979, parapsychologist D. Scott Rogo described an alleged paranormal phenomenon in which people report that they receive simple, brief, and usually single-occurrence telephone calls from spirits of deceased relatives, friends, or strangers.
"[27] 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 researcher" Mark Macy, as a guide.
[13] Barušs stated that he 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.
[28] 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 to choose the best match.
[13] Paranormal claims for the origin of EVP include living humans imprinting thoughts directly on an electronic medium through psychokinesis[33] and communication by discarnate entities such as spirits,[34][35] nature energies, beings from other dimensions, or extraterrestrials.
[37] Brian Regal in Pseudoscience: A Critical Encyclopedia (2009) has written "A case can be made for the idea that many EVPs are artifacts of the recording process itself with which the operators are unfamiliar.
"[38] There are a number of simple scientific explanations that can account for why some listeners to the static on audio devices may believe they hear voices, including radio interference and the tendency of the human brain to recognize patterns in random stimuli.
[40] In the case of EVP it could result in an observer interpreting random noise on an audio recording as being the familiar sound of a human voice.
[54] Interference from CB Radio transmissions and wireless baby monitors, or anomalies generated through cross modulation from other electronic devices, are all documented phenomena.
[58] Meteors leave a trail of ionised particles and electrons as they pass through the upper atmosphere (a process called ablation) which reflect transmission radio waves which would usually flow into space.
[63] The Rorschach Audio Project, initiated by sound artist Joe Banks,[43][44][64][65] which presents EVP as a product of radio interference combined with auditory pareidolia and the Interdisciplinary Laboratory for Biopsychocybernetics Research, a non-profit organization dedicated to studying anomalous phenomena related to neurophysiological conditions.
[70] An informal survey by the organization's Department Of Phenomenal Evidence cites that 1/3 of churches conduct sessions in which participants seek to communicate with spirit entities using EVP.
[72] In 2015, an investigation by associate professor of Sociology Marc Eaton on the demography of United States paranormal groups that used electronic voice phenomenon found an overrepresentation of white participants, raised in the Roman Catholic Church (which is only 21% of the U.S. population), mainly with some post-secondary education.
[76] Sylvio is an indie-developed first-person horror adventure video game released on Steam in June 2015 for Microsoft Windows, PlayStation 4, Xbox One and, OS X, utilizing the Unity engine.
Amfortas' character and the EVP subplot do not appear in the film version of the novel, The Exorcist III, although in Kinderman's dream dead people are seen trying to communicate with the living by radio.
In Nyctivoe, a 2001 vampire-inspired play by Dimitris Lyacos, the male character as well as his deceased companion are speaking from a recording device amidst a static/white noise background.
In With the people from the bridge, a 2014 play by Dimitris Lyacos based on the idea of the return of the dead, the voice of the female character NCTV is transmitted from a television monitor amidst a static/white noise background.
EVP is the subject of Vyktoria Pratt Keating's song "Disembodied Voices on Tape" from her 2003 album Things that Fall from the Sky, produced by Andrew Giddings of Jethro Tull.
Laurie Anderson's "Example #22", from her 1981 album Big Science, interposes spoken sentences and phrases in German with sung passages in English representing EVP.
