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A How to Guide to Capturing Electronic Voice Phenomenon By Russ Noratel Edited by Elizabeth Ford
With the dawn of a new era in which television shows demonstrate the use of voice recording equipment to capture phantom voices, EVP, or Electronic Voice Phenomenon, has become a more popular subject than ever before. I will be the first to admit that I began my research into EVP because of a television show that had demonstrated it. I was fascinated with the idea of hearing a voice that I knew didn’t come from a physical being. I have a feeling that many of the new paranormal investigators and researchers out there have gotten their start in a similar way. For those that don’t know, EVP is a voice that is captured on a recording that was not heard by human ears when the sound was made. Some people believe that if you hear a sound and capture it on your recorder, you have caught an EVP. This is not the case. When a sound is both heard by an individual and a recording device, it is considered Voice Phenomenon, as opposed to Electronic Voice Phenomenon EVP is not something new to the world. As a matter of fact, folks were picking up sounds and words on recording devices as early as the 1950’s. On of the earliest EVP Recorders was Friedrich Juergenson. While recording some bird songs, Good old Mr. Juergenson ended up recording a voice from a person that wasn’t there. Mr. Juergenson described this voice as that of his mother. Of course Mr. Juergenson was a bit perplexed because his mother was no longer among the living at the time of this recording. This recording intrigued Mr. Juergenson, who then took it upon himself to go about making more recordings. During those recordings, he picked up many more voices. He went on to write a book titled “Voices from the Universe”. By the 1960’s Dr. Konstantin Raudive caught word of Mr. Juegenson’s work with EVP. The phenomenon intrigued Dr. Raudive, who began experimenting with it. Dr. Raudive is said to have recorded hundreds, if not thousands of EVP’s. What does this mean to all of us? Well these people laid the foundation of modern EVP research and all with reel-to-reel tape recorders. You might be saying, what does the history of EVP have to do with a how to guide? The answer is that if you want to research a subject, you need to have at least a basic knowledge of its beginnings. While it is nice for you to read and do hundreds of hours of research on the subject of EVP through books, it can get a little tedious and boring. I suggest reading a couple of books on the subject and a doing lot of Internet browsing. Of course reading books and searching the Internet isn’t as exciting as conducting your own experiments is it? You want to know what it takes to capture EVP. Unlike your predecessors, you won’t need to spend hundreds of dollars on tapes and equipment. Modern technology is a wonderful thing and you can purchase a digital voice recorder for less than forty dollars. There is no need to go out and purchase a two hundred dollar digital voice recorder because it won’t increase your odds of recording EVP. For the purposes of this discussion, I am going to talk about the forty-dollar digital voice recorder. The first thing that you want to do when attempting to record EVP is have a game plan. I usually try to identify any sort of natural sounds that may occur. Some examples of these sounds are the sounds of kitchen appliances or a leaky sink. I also set my recorder down and attempt to see if it records sounds from behind closed doors, or walls. Check to see if anyone is staying in a nearby room and determine any sort of sounds that your recorder may pick up from them. Taking these steps will help you determine an EVP from a drunken snoring hotel guest sleeping in the next room. I also strongly believe in a 2-fold approach to recording. I believe that you must leave a recorder alone for a time. Just sit the recorder down on a table and seal the location to the best of your ability. Some time later (I usually suggest an hour or so), come back and end the recording. Have yourself and any one else in your group sit down and get comfortable and seal the room. Place the recorder down and begin a questioning session. I suggest having a set of basic questions to ask, with each member of the group getting a chance to ask a question. Use the set list of questions, so you can document any possible response to them. If you get a response to a certain question, you should ask that same list of questions again at a future time with the recorder running, and see if you can garner the same response to the same question. You want to establish a pattern of evidence. I also suggest taking a free form questioning approach after your structured questioning session. My last piece of advice for EVP sessions is to not review the recording at the time it’s taken. Turn your recorder off, go home and review the recording at a later date. By going home to review the evidence, you can give yourself time to rest and clear your thoughts. If you were to review the evidence at the site it was recorded, you may not be able to be as objective about any suspected EVP that you may have recorded. Now comes the part of EVP experimentation that is both the most exciting and most tedious, reviewing the evidence. This is the part that they don’t show you on television. On television, they just show you at most a time lapsed picture of evidence review. You, however, don’t live in a time-lapse television world. You will need complete silence and the ability to concentrate on your recordings. I suggest setting aside certain blocks of time for review and time for breaks. Have a pad of paper and a pen with you to note the time of any suspected EVP that you hear. Most recorders come with a small speaker that you can listen to your recordings through. I suggest that you invest in some stereo headphones. The cost of headphones can be anywhere from one dollar to one hundred dollars, it just depends on the quality and comfort that you wish to have. I personally use low to mid priced headphones to listen to my recordings. Since we live in the computer age, many people have a computer and Internet. You may have seen some television shows that show a computer program that is used to show the sound waves from a recording. You can do this with your own PC for the cost of a small stereo-to-stereo cord that you can buy at many electronics stores. You take that cord and plug it into the headphone portion of your digital recorder and take the other end into the microphone jack in your computer. The next step would be to download and install a sound program called Audacity to your computer. While there are many different sound programs out there, I like to keep my costs to a minimum. Audacity is a powerful program and it is absolutely free to the best of my knowledge. Just do a search with most major search engines and you will find a link to the program. Pretty soon you will not only be able to hear, but also see the sound waves of any EVP that you may record. I listen to the recordings via the digital recorder and if I believe that I have captured an EVP, I review the recording on my computer. In closing I hope that my suggestions will bring you great success with capturing EVP. Just remember that you don’t need to spend tons of money on equipment for EVP experimentation. Most of all remember that trying to capture EVP should be a fun experience, not a tedious one. Works cited: What You Need to Know About Electronic Voice Phenomenon. http://paranormal.about.com/library/weekly/aa020303a.htm EVP Research Association UK- Electronic Voice Phenomenon-A History http://www.evpuk.com/evp_history.html Rosemary Ellen Guiley. The Encyclopedia of Ghosts and Spirits 2nd edition. New York, Checkmark Books 2000. Suggested Web Sites |
