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satans_mom
Skeptic Friend
USA
148 Posts |
 Posted - 10/24/2004 : 10:14:34
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Electronic Voice Phenomenon....
As I was waiting in the movie theatre for a movie to actually begin, I was forced to endure 30 minutes of terrible music, 25 minutes of TELEVISION COMMERCIALS, and yet another 10 for movie previews. Stuck in between the television commercials segment and the movie previews segment, there was an advertisement for an upcoming movie that explains everything to do with ELECTRONIC VOICE PHENOMENON.
You probably already guessed it-- the dead "communicating with the living through means of electronics, via computers, stereos, and other electronic devices" by "speaking" through them. They had examples of someone asking into the speakers, "Who are you?" and the response being recorded as "Katy" (or whatever name it was of the dead). Ironically, to me, it sounded nothing like "Katy" and more of just static feedback. There was also, "Yup... this is Rob," "Get out of my house," and "Where's mommie?"
C'mon now.
I daily intercept cell phone calls through MY computer speakers as cars drive by on the very nearby highyway (approximately 100ish feet from my back door, I look at it now) and I am fully convinced it is not normal occurence but the DEAD communicating to me. If I turn my speakers on now with no other noise being transmitted through them, I GUARANTEE that within the next 10 minutes I will receive some sort of noise that sounds EXACTLY LIKE people talking... because it is living people talking. Yet I am still convinced it's the dead.
Ooooh weee ooooooooh
The world is going to hell in a handbasket.
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Yo mama's so fat, she's on both sides of the family.
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Siberia
SFN Addict
Brazil
2322 Posts |
Posted - 10/24/2004 : 14:54:15 [Permalink]
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quote:
Originally posted by satans_mom
Electronic Voice Phenomenon....
As I was waiting in the movie theatre for a movie to actually begin, I was forced to endure 30 minutes of terrible music, 25 minutes of TELEVISION COMMERCIALS, and yet another 10 for movie previews. Stuck in between the television commercials segment and the movie previews segment, there was an advertisement for an upcoming movie that explains everything to do with ELECTRONIC VOICE PHENOMENON.
Oh no, not up there in US too? I HATE THAT.
-ahem- On the topic... I believe that creed might have evolved from that feeling of awe that grasps people with little to no knowledge (or interest) of it. Rather silly, but still happily true. Computers and other electronic gadgets ought to have something mysterious behind them - such as channeling the dead and the strangest things. |
"Why are you afraid of something you're not even sure exists?"
- The Kovenant, Via Negativa
"People who don't like their beliefs being laughed at shouldn't have such funny beliefs."
-- unknown
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Dude
SFN Die Hard
USA
6891 Posts |
Posted - 10/24/2004 : 20:51:18 [Permalink]
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| It's the subject of a halloween movie this year.... looks pretty dumb. |
Ignorance is preferable to error; and he is less remote from the truth who believes nothing, than he who believes what is wrong.
-- Thomas Jefferson
"god :: the last refuge of a man with no answers and no argument." - G. Carlin
Hope, n.
The handmaiden of desperation; the opiate of despair; the illegible signpost on the road to perdition. ~~ da filth |
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Renae
SFN Regular
543 Posts |
Posted - 10/26/2004 : 20:34:33 [Permalink]
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I saw the preview for this movie and it tweaked me out.
I have a very high woo-woo threshold, so very little creeps me out. But something about white noise is, well...creepy.
I checked out their website and played some of their supposedly undead recorded supposed voices. It creeped me out further and scared my cat, who ran under the bed.
The website: www.aaevp.com.
*shudders*
Maybe it's the time of year...Halloween and all.
Okay...so maybe the tapes are faked. Maybe it's like seeing shapes in clouds: we interpret something from nothing. Or maybe the tapes pick up what we missed hearing but were normal human voices.
Okay.
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H. Humbert
SFN Die Hard
USA
4574 Posts |
Posted - 10/26/2004 : 21:12:54 [Permalink]
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quote:
Originally posted by Renae
Maybe it's like seeing shapes in clouds: we interpret something from nothing.
From what I've read, most studies seem to confirm this hypothesis. When people are told what phrase or words they are going to hear in the noise in advance, there are high rates of recognition. Give them a choice of similar sounding phonetic phrases, that drops. Give them nothing in advance, the rates drop precipitately, with most hearing nothing coherant in the noise at all.
Of course, some cases of clearly intelligible speech are most likely due to signal leakage. As satans_mom said, it is a fairly common occurance.
On a lighter note, Randi reported on a woman who claimed she had tape of her coffee pot speaking to her. The clips sound exactly like those favored by Electronic Voice Phenomena proponents.
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"A man is his own easiest dupe, for what he wishes to be true he generally believes to be true." --Demosthenes
"The first principle is that you must not fool yourself - and you are the easiest person to fool." --Richard P. Feynman
"Face facts with dignity." --found inside a fortune cookie |
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Paulos23
Skeptic Friend
USA
446 Posts |
Posted - 10/27/2004 : 21:30:17 [Permalink]
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| Stare at chaos long enough and you will start to see patterns. In this case hear voices in static. |
You can go wrong by being too skeptical as readily as by being too trusting. -- Robert A. Heinlein
Facts do not cease to exist because they are ignored. -- Aldous Huxley |
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furshur
SFN Regular
USA
1536 Posts |
Posted - 10/28/2004 : 07:14:24 [Permalink]
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| Welcome Paulos23! |
If I knew then what I know now then I would know more now than I know. |
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Siberia
SFN Addict
Brazil
2322 Posts |
Posted - 10/28/2004 : 07:19:35 [Permalink]
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Welcome!
My coffee pot speaks to me. We have long, intelligent conversations. Not as intelligent as the ones I've with my off-work radio, though. The radio's pretty amusing. |
"Why are you afraid of something you're not even sure exists?"
- The Kovenant, Via Negativa
"People who don't like their beliefs being laughed at shouldn't have such funny beliefs."
-- unknown
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BigPapaSmurf
SFN Die Hard
3192 Posts |
Posted - 10/28/2004 : 09:20:50 [Permalink]
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| Yeah that Mr. Coffee hes a gossip for sure. He told me Jack Neighbors down the street has athird nipple. |
"...things I have neither seen nor experienced nor heard tell of from anybody else; things, what is more, that do not in fact exist and could not ever exist at all. So my readers must not believe a word I say." -Lucian on his book True History
"...They accept such things on faith alone, without any evidence. So if a fraudulent and cunning person who knows how to take advantage of a situation comes among them, he can make himself rich in a short time." -Lucian critical of early Christians c.166 AD From his book, De Morte Peregrini |
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Dude
SFN Die Hard
USA
6891 Posts |
Posted - 10/28/2004 : 09:38:39 [Permalink]
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The human brain is wired to see patterns. It's how we recognize one another. It's also why people see faces where none exist.... like clouds/tortila bread/glass windows/ect....
If these EVP tapes aren't outright fakes, then most likely the explanation is simple interference from somebody's cellphone. A controlled experiment, easily devised by your average 8th grader, could probably rule out a supernatural cause for EVP. |
Ignorance is preferable to error; and he is less remote from the truth who believes nothing, than he who believes what is wrong.
-- Thomas Jefferson
"god :: the last refuge of a man with no answers and no argument." - G. Carlin
Hope, n.
The handmaiden of desperation; the opiate of despair; the illegible signpost on the road to perdition. ~~ da filth |
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dominic_dice
Skeptic Friend
United Kingdom
53 Posts |
Posted - 10/28/2004 : 13:47:39 [Permalink]
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| At night my fish tank pump often starts to sound like a radio coversation after a certain time. |
"Are you THE dominic_dice"
"No, a dominic_dice. I come in six packs now" |
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MichaelMN
New Member
1 Post |
Posted - 11/04/2004 : 04:39:42 [Permalink]
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The interesting thing to me about EVP is that it seems to be the most testable of all paranormal events.
For instance, analysis can be done to see if the 'voices' fit normal speech patterns, and a reviewable methodology can be used to determine how and what kind of filtering and amplification should be used before subjecting a tape to any enhancing process.
To eliminate the chance of the recorder picking up stray sounds, the location could be largely soundproofed and/or the location distant enough from other humans that stray voices could not be picked up. Additional recording equipment could be set up inside and outside the room to help verify the location of the source of the 'voices'.
Regarding radio interference, studies could be done (if they have not already) to see how the phenomena of how radio interference can show up on a recording device. An examination should be made to see how/if the phenonmena shows up in non-psychic arenas such as surveillance. From this a means might be determined to create a recording device which would be proof against such interference. |
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ktesibios
SFN Regular
USA
505 Posts |
Posted - 11/04/2004 : 21:29:05 [Permalink]
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I've been working in professional recording studios (the big, expensive kind) as a technician and engineer for fifteen years now, and I do wish I had a sawbuck for every time some CBer or a nearby FM station started coming out of the monitors.
Sometimes this stuff gets into the recording and isn't noticed until later. I can recall a session overdubbing percussion where the only reason we discovered that there was low-level zark on the tape while we could still do a re-take was that I decided to review the new tracks one at a time while the producer took a lunch break. It was hard to identify until I noticed that the odd noises were all in 4/4 time- turned out to be the same ol' FM station getting into a mic cable with a defective shield.
About the only way I can think of to render a recording system with any analog portion something akin to proof against RFI would be to put the whole kit 'n' caboodle inside a screen room (basically a big Faraday cage) and power everything from batteries inside the screen to avoid having any penetrations of the shielding. Even then I'd be hesitant to assume that RFI was ruled out as an explanation of anything that turned up on the recording.
Back in Philly, one of my peculiar specialties was doing enhancements of recordings for the legal profession, that is, trying to pull intelligibility out of tapes that were really bad. Most of the time it was boring stuff, but sometimes it was seriously exciting and sometimes grisly. When I started doing this stuff, I was using analog filtering, EQ and dynamics processing; when we converted our media rooms to being digital audio workstation-based, I moved into using that technology. I was pretty good at it, though I say it myself.
On that front, there's some good news for the prospective EVP analyst. Once you've copied your source recording into a DAW, you have virtually unlimited opportunity to try different combinations of processes without messing up your source material. The DSP in most workstations is real-time and nondestructive nowadays, and even if you have to use a process which is destructive- that is, which permanently alters the file being processed- you have only to copy the file first and process the copy while leaving the original untouched. My custom, when I had to use destructive processing, was to make a file copy of every step I took, to create an electronic "paper trail" documenting everything I did between the original dub and the final result.
As MichaelMN suggests, if you record with multiple mics in carefully plotted locations to individual tracks on a multitrack system, it should be possible to use the relative time of arrival of a sound at each mic to determine the location of the source.
And it's practicable. Here in LA, I could round up all the gear needed to make controlled recordings in an alleged EVP location with a single phone call (assuming that someone is footing the rental bill).
Trouble is, I suspect that you're much more likely to be confronted with a crummy analog cassette made under uncontrolled conditions by a believer with no pro audio background than you are to get the opportunity to do a serious investigation. 
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"The Republican agenda is to turn the United States into a third-world shithole." -P.Z.Myers |
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ktesibios
SFN Regular
USA
505 Posts |
Posted - 11/04/2004 : 21:40:50 [Permalink]
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Oh, forgot to mention- my experience with listening to things which it was impossible for me to understand- like backwards speech, which I've heard a very great deal of- is that after a while one's mind will start seizing on bits and pieces and making intelligible speech out of them. The same thing seems to happen if I listen to a station broadcasting in a language I don't understand.
Our ear/brain system is very well adapted to understanding speech. Our hearing acuity- the ability to detect small changes in loudness or pitch, and the ability to detect low-level sounds, is at its greatest right in the range of frequencies which have been experimentally shown to be the most critical to speech intelligibility. Even the length of the ear canal is such as to produce a pressure boost at the eardrum in that 2 kHz octave band.
The selective pressures that promoted that adaptation of the physical side of our hearing aren't hard to imagine. The survival value of being well equipped to grasp the meaning of "Yo Og! Watch out for the bear!" seems pretty obvious.
That same process of adaptation would also be affecting the brain... |
"The Republican agenda is to turn the United States into a third-world shithole." -P.Z.Myers |
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filthy
SFN Die Hard
USA
14408 Posts |
Posted - 11/05/2004 : 03:58:42 [Permalink]
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quote:
On that front, there's some good news for the prospective EVP analyst. Once you've copied your source recording into a DAW, you have virtually unlimited opportunity to try different combinations of processes without messing up your source material. The DSP in most workstations is real-time and nondestructive nowadays, and even if you have to use a process which is destructive- that is, which permanently alters the file being processed- you have only to copy the file first and process the copy while leaving the original untouched. My custom, when I had to use destructive processing, was to make a file copy of every step I took, to create an electronic "paper trail" documenting everything I did between the original dub and the final result.
Sounds almost like defusing a bomb. The British, following WW-II became very good at that. One guy would work on the munition and be in constant telephone contact with his team, telling them, step-by-step what he was doing. That way, if he was blasted into a pink mist, and not a few of them were, his team would know what mistake he'd made.
I have a small, pretty old, electric space heater with a fairly noisey fan. Sometimes when it's running, I will 'hear' a car pulling into my gravel driveway.
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"What luck for rulers that men do not think." -- Adolf Hitler (1889 - 1945)
"If only we could impeach on the basis of criminal stupidity, 90% of the Rethuglicans and half of the Democrats would be thrown out of office." ~~ P.Z. Myres
"The default position of human nature is to punch the other guy in the face and take his stuff." ~~ Dude
Brother Boot Knife of Warm Humanitarianism,
and Crypto-Communist! 
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ktesibios
SFN Regular
USA
505 Posts |
Posted - 11/05/2004 : 14:43:33 [Permalink]
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quote:
Originally posted by filthy
Sounds almost like defusing a bomb. The British, following WW-II became very good at that. One guy would work on the munition and be in constant telephone contact with his team, telling them, step-by-step what he was doing. That way, if he was blasted into a pink mist, and not a few of them were, his team would know what mistake he'd made.
Well, some of the albums I worked on could qualify as bombs
No need for the "now I'm putting the frammin on the jimja...KABOOM!" thing though. We all knew in advance that our fatal mistake was getting into the business in the first place... 
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"The Republican agenda is to turn the United States into a third-world shithole." -P.Z.Myers |
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