Some science behind the scenes
Electronic Voice Phenomenon
E.V.P. is an abbreviation for 'Electronic Voice Phenomenon'. EVP is the capturing on audio equipment of voices, music or noises that were not originally part of the recording. Those who would wish to dramatise it, giving it a paranormal edge, define it as “attempted communication between the living and the physically dead”, and thereby ensure that those who are genuinely interested in the phenomenon and want to find out why it is happening, are ridiculed as completely barmy.
They aren’t.
It may have a simple cause. It may be a faulty machine picking up signals it wasn’t meant to pick up, in much the same way that taps near a large radio transmitter used to broadcast. My husband’s family in Droitwich could listen to the Light programme from their taps – but then their house was very close to a very powerful transmitter.
Furthermore, we have the added complexity that those desperate to prove communication from dead spirits, simply imagine that background interference during the recording is a communication. Thus the cries of ‘gie us anuvver cup, Gladys’ is not communication from their long deceased Aunty Gladys, but simply one cleaning lady talking to another during their tea break – a sound the machine with its sensitive microphone might pick up when they didn’t.
But, if we exclude all these possibilities, there have been cases of odd noises occurring on machines, sufficiently interesting to warrant study as far back as the late 1800s, at the time when electricity and electrical communication was in its infancy. During World War I, voices were heard on early radios and also recorded as faint whispers on magnetic tape. It appears to happen far less often, now we no longer use audiotapes and old fashioned radios, indicating it may have been something to do with the medium of magnetic tape and the use of crystals in radios.
Both Thomas Edison and Nikola Tesla mentioned ‘unusual, disembodied voices’ – which they would be – coming from electrical equipment. Tesla hallucinated voices anyway, principally because he constantly subjected himself to very high power electrical stimulation of his brain. Thus the voices were not in the equipment they were in his head
'The sounds I am listening to every night at first appear to be human voices, conversing back and forth...I find it difficult to imagine that I am actually hearing real voices from people not of this planet...there must be a more simple explanation that has so far eluded me'.
But it is not good science to dismiss all these strange occurrences as hallucinations either. There may be features of the equipment or the particular configurations of the equipment that shed new light on other stranger phenomenon for which we have no explanation.
As mentioned the use of crystals is exceptionally important in this respect, as crystals are the link between the physical and spiritual realms – the physical is energy made to look solid by mathematically constructing crystal forms – the physical world is made of crystal.
Observations
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