What is Electronic Voice Phenomena (EVP)?

Also Called Raudive’s Voices Due to His Extensive EVP Research

Mar 29, 2009 Jill Stefko

EVP's roots go back to the 1800s. People were interested in communicating with spirits. Raudive developed research methods, classifications and theories on EVP.

Electronic Voice Phenomena or "EVP" is a phenomenon where an unexplained a voice or voices are recorded on tape recorders by a process not yet understood. Recordings usually last for a few minutes or less. Generally, intense concentration is required in order to hear the voices. Most tapes have to be replayed several times to decipher the words. Using headphones is recommended.

EVP Research

Since the rise of Spiritualism that began with the Fox sisters in the 1800s, there have been many attempts to contact the dead. Thomas Alva Edison saw new technology, part of which he invented, as a means of communication with spirits. He tried to make contact through a phonograph device in the 1890s.

In the late 1920s, he tried to make contact with by special chemical equipment. It’s alleged that spirit voices were recorded on phonograph records in 1938.

EVP research started with Friedrich Jürgenson. His interest in EVP began when he heard voices on a tape recording of birds’ chirping when no one else was in the area. This led to his tape recording areas where no one was present and publishing two books.

Dr. Konstantin Raudive was a psychologist who taught at Sweden’s University of Uppsala. He was intensely interested in parapsychology, especially the possibility of life after death. Raudive worked with Jürgenson. They had differences, so Raudive researched EVPs on his own.

Raudive recorded over 100,000 audiotapes with the assistance of electronic experts. Most tapes were made under strict laboratory conditions. Sometimes, he collaborated with Dr. Hans Bender, a prestigious respected German parapsychologist. Over 400 people were involved Raudive’s research.

In 1970, Raudive’s Breakthrough: An Amazing Experiment in Electronic Communication with the Dead was published by the Taplinger Publishing Company, Incorporated.

Raudive’s Methods of Recording EVP He referred to these as:

Microphone voices: The tape recorder’s activated. The microphone can be disconnected.
Radio voices: One records white noise from a radio not tuned to any station.
Diode voices: One records from what is essentially a crystal set not tuned to a station.

Raudive's Description of EVP Voices

They speak very rapidly, in a mixture of languages, sometimes as many as five or six in a single sentence.
They speak in a rhythm that appears to be forced.
The rhythm has an abbreviated telegram-like phrase or sentence.
Grammatical rules are frequently abandoned and new words and/or meanings of existing ones proliferate.

Possible Explanations for EVP

Cross-modulation - This is when a carrier’s signals are overcome by an undesired signal.The most common example is when radio stations on FM and AM stations are sharing the same signal, allowing the user to hear both at a static noise level. When this happens, FM radios will demodulate the weaker station. Raudive dismissed this because music hasn’t been heard on EVPs
Apophenia – A common perceptual phenomenon involving hearing or seeing patterns where none exist. A common example is when people are taking a shower and think they hear the phone ring. The white noise the shower produces has a spectrum of sounds which the ear hears as ringing.
Pareidolia - an illusion that involves misperceiving a stimulus. It can be seeing Jesus' face on a tortilla which happened in Mexico in the 1970s. This and apophenia are also used as possible explanations for "Shadow People."
EVP could be what it purports to be, voices of spirits.

The conclusion is that EVP does exist as experience has proved. In the 1940s, the Reverend Drayton Thomas investigated medium Gladys Osborne. He and others believed she could enable voices heard during scientific experiments. He recorded these and identified one as his father. In the 1950s, respected parapsychologist Raymond Bayless recorded disembodied voices heard near psychic Atilla Von Szalay. After experimentation with equipment which finally became a microphone inside a box with its cord connected to an external tape recorder. A microphone was placed near a megaphone to magnify the sound for recording. Bayless and Von Szalay submitted their report to the Journal of the American Society for Psychical Research and was published in 1956.

Years of research has been unable to dismiss some EVP as naturally happening or signal interference. More research still needs to be done with the proper equipment in sterile laboratory conditions using the scientific method so results can be duplicated if possible. The problem is that psychic phenomena still cannot be always be controlled.