EVP III (Electronic mediumship)

Broadly speaking, mediumship can be defined as a person's ability to get in touch with the spirits. This concept follows very closely a famous definition made by A. Kardec in his treatise on mediumship, published in the heyday of Spiritualism. At the time, it was clear that mediumship manifestations could make use of external objects (as in the case of the celebrated "table-turning" or more generally in the haunting phenomena) or simply transmit elaborate information through the so-called "intellectual mediums".

It is understandable that the invention of electronic communication systems (as new manifestation media) prompted the emergence of new effects under the action of corresponding electronic mediums. As in every mediumship, the new ability can be understood as a more or less developed human skill to communicate with spirits through electronic equipment. "Development'' refers to the observed level of elaboration in the communicated message, or how complex or well-presented the transmitted information appears to the external world. 

Kardec proposed a 4-dimensional characterization of the mediumship faculty based on traits of:

• Passivity: characterizing the extent to which the medium can influence the content of a communication. The extremes of this dimension are complete passivity (e. g., clairvoyance) and active mediums (who have an active role in conveying information as in certain non-mechanical psychography mediums).
• Awareness: or how aware the person is of his or her role as a medium. Awareness is split into two classes: unconscious versus conscious mediums. In the first case, also known as involuntary or natural mediums by Kardec, the person is completely unaware of the ability. This variety is highly frequent among children and teenagers. In the second case (facultative mediums) there is complete awareness of the ability to produce or suppress phenomena through the will.
• Tangibility: referring to the intellectual versus "material'' effect produced by the mediumship. Physical effect mediums produce tangible phenomena (movement of objects, sounds such as raps and noises, healing etc). On the other hand, intellectual mediums produce intelligent, informative, or artistic communications (for example, painting mediums etc).
• Spontaneity: involuntary mediums cannot control the onset, end, duration, and content of the manifestation. The majority of recorded psychic effects throughout history are of this type.  On the other hand, some mediums are able to control (or at least suppress) the manifestation. 

According to such a scheme, one can conceive electronic mediumship as a kind of psychic faculty capable of producing tangible effects (signals in the form of noise or voices) through electronic media almost exclusively. We say "almost exclusively" because it is uncertain if electronic mediums are able to manifest other mediumship types (for example, intellectual effects). EVP are tangible and mostly spontaneous, but the medium is seldom aware he/she is responsible for them. The manifestations are apparently spontaneous mainly in the early stages and remain uncontrollable throughout the medium's life.

No mediumship ability can be dissociated from “animism” which is the manifestation of the spirit of the medium through its own body. In other words, electronic mediums can subtly modify the content of EVP messages. This is true even for purely "mechanical mediums" as pointed out in on the medium's influence in the content of spirit communications:

Do these explanations imply that the spirit of the medium is never completely passive?

“It is passive when it does not mix its own ideas with those of the communicating spirit, but it is never completely nullified. Its cooperation is indispensable as an intermediary, even in so-called mechanical mediums''. (Question 10 of Paragraph  223 of "The Mediums' book").

Thus, the content of many EVP recorded by K. Raudive, a mixture of words many times uttered in different languages Raudive knew very well, might be explained as the result of this influence, despite the unintentional (and unconscious) character. This does not mean that the message content is familiar to the medium, or cannot be attributed to the spirits. 

The most distinguished dimension of electronic mediumship is its unconscious character. It does not seem to require mental concentration, no "trance" is necessary. This principle was put forward by the spirits themselves to Kardec:

Can a spirit act without resorting to a medium?

"It can act without the medium being aware of it; in other words, many persons help spirits to produce certain phenomena without even suspecting it(*). These persons are like fountains from which spirits draw the animal fluid they need. Consequently, the conscious participation of a medium, as you know, is not always necessary, especially with spontaneous phenomena.'' (my emphasis, Part II, ``The action of spirits upon matter'', Paragraph 74, Question 15 of "The Mediums' book.)

Therefore, the presence of a nearby but unknown electronic medium might explain many eventual recordings. 

By relying on special mediums the phenomenon is thus more prevalent in the presence of certain people than among the majority. This explains the futility of trying to "replicate" EVP when an electronic medium is missing. On the other hand, granted their presence, EVP can be replicated although no control over the message length, frequency, and content seems possible. 

Notes

(*) Original in French: "beaucoup de personnes servent d'auxiliaires aux Esprits pour certains phénomènes, sans s'en douter".

Next post:  EVP IV (Intention and physical interface)

EVP II (Electronic Voice Phenomena)

Fig. 1 One of the earliest EVP reports published in the XX century: "Voices from the beyond on the telephone. New and admirable system of communication. Spirits talk on the telephone''.

As in XK's karaoke recordings, the Electronic Voice Phenomena or EVP (*) gained notoriety when F. Jürgenson (1903-1987), a Swedish artist and singer, was recording birdsongs in 1959. At first, he believed voices were interference sources coming from radio stations operating nearby. Since the voices replied unmistakably to “callings”, and other anomalous answers were obtained even when the equipment was shielded in Faraday cages (to block external electromagnetic radiation), Jürgenson was convinced of their paranormal origin. Since then, names like Konstantin Raudive (1909-1974) and Hans O. König are linked to the history of EVP as relevant researchers who recorded many clear voices which cannot be explained away easily. In what appeared to be an acceptance of something already known, some Vatican authorities supported EVP experiments and claimed the voices came from Purgatory.

In fact, the interest in contacting spirits with electronic equipment is as old as the invention of wireless communication. It soon became clear to technical celebrities such as Thomas Edison (1847-1931), Oliver Lodge (1851-1940), and Nikola Tesla (1856-1943) that it might be possible to use the recently invented radio or some sort of electric circuit to communicate with the dead. Edison exchanged correspondence with William Crookes (1832-1919) about the possibility of obtaining images of spirits. In an interview for Scientific American in 1920, (an unthinkable interview given the publication standards of this journal today), Edison trustfully stated:

I have been thinking for some time of a machine or apparatus which could be operated by personalities that have passed on to another existence or sphere.

After declaring he knew nothing about the subject of “our personality passing on to another existence or sphere”, Edison continued: 

But I do claim that it is possible to construct an apparatus that will be so delicate that if there are personalities in another existence or sphere who wish to get in touch with us in this existence or sphere, this apparatus will at least give them a better opportunity to express themselves than the tilting tables and raps and ouija boards and mediums and the other crude methods now purported to be the only means of communication.

He proposed to build a highly sensitive instrument in which electric currents could be manipulated by the dead provided they existed in “another sphere”. It did not occur to Edison that the human ear is such a sensitive machine. As it is known, at the threshold of human audition (~1 pW/m2), the ear can detect oscillations in air molecules as small as 1/10 the size of an atom! 

Zarrelli stated properly that the “spirit phone” was Edison’s most fruitless invention. This failure should be attributed to Edison's disregard for the conditions under which the phenomenon occurs. Just having any apparatus, no matter how sensitive, is not enough. But Edison’s reasoning is very much alive these days. In a recent article, the same conclusions were drawn for the super-ultra-sensitive LHC collider in the context of detecting “other dimensions” including “ghosts”. 

Communication by electronic media was possible since the widespread use of wired telephony. Predating Raymond Bayless experiments in 195, Oscar D’Argonnel published in 1925 Vozes do Além pelo Telephone (“Voices from the beyond on the telephone”, see Figure 1). This book reports D’Argonnel’s experiences with spirit communication a decade before its publication in Brazil. Recent research unveiled a curious Brazilian patent filled by the Portuguese Augusto de Oliveira Cambraia in 1909. Named Telegrapho Vocativo, its purpose was to transmit information through the air by using “souls and spirits floating in the atmosphere”. However, today it is hard to know what Cambraia meant by “souls and spirits” (it seems an improper reference to radio waves). Such scattered accounts of anomalous communication by wired phones at the beginning of the XX century can be linked to EVP reports using tape recorders much later. 

Because no theory was ever available to explain how the voices could be picked up anomalously (or more generally speaking “signals” in the case of ITC – instrumental transcommunication), the EVP research took a purely empirical path since Jürgenson’s first recordings. Several technical arrangements for obtaining EVP were invented: using a simple tape recorder, with a recorder and a shortwave radio, with a recorder and a noise generator, using computers converted into digital recorders and noise generators, using a single or several radios as a noise source and a digital recorder and many others. 

Since Edison's time, enthusiasts have supported the thesis of EVP as a non-mediumistic phenomenon par excellence. Provided a refined method existed in the future, they believe EVP could become the most trustworthy way of communicating with the beyond. After all, the information would come directly from the source (the spirits) to the equipment with no human influence. Perhaps many officials of the Catholic Church supported EVP in this non-mediumistic sense because the idea undermined any non-Catholic explanation implied by the medium’s presence.

But such non-mediumistic nature attributed to EVP is a naïve oversimplification of what may really happen during the voice recordings.  In 1925, D'Argonnel emphasized the need for special mediums in his telephonic experiences. Clear phrases were obtained by a few researchers in the past and today.  Others have recorded utterances as noise modulations which could be interpreted as acceptable answers to proposed questions. In fact, many EVP messages are barely lengthier than a couple of words forming short phrases. The majority of EVP enthusiasts have recorded barely understandable words feeding pareidolia-based explanations by skeptics. The frequency and quality of EVP messages are definitely correlated to the presence of certain people. 

Notes

(*) EVP acronym is used for both phenomenon (sing.)  or phenomena (plural).

Next post:  EVP III (Electronic Mediumship)

EVP I (A haunted Karaoke)

Fig. 1 Spectrogram of the first recording showing the audio feedback at about 1KHz and the anomalous voice (AV1) after 11 seconds. The number of audio samples for each FFT segment is 256.

But, soft: behold! lo where it comes again!

I'll cross it, though it blast me. - Stay, illusion!

If thou hast any sound, or use a voice.

Speak to me!

W. Shakespeare, Hamlet, 1.1

My nephew XK lives in the US and is a young American who speaks both Portuguese and English. Driven by his love for singing, he was alone at home recording songs with a Karaoke system. Careless about one of his recordings, he left the recorder on a little longer. To his surprise, he noticed an unexpected voice at the end of one of the files. After inquiring the unseen to give him and his mother a reply, the unusual voice appeared a second time. Fearing the invisible, he abandoned his karaoke sessions since then.

Fig.2 Filtered waveforms of AV1 in the indicated interval showing the anomalous voice.

My sister sent me two of the raw MP4 files sampled at 48KHz. The first recording was obtained on June 18 2019 at 4:03 pm and the second one about one hour later. The total recording time length of samples 1 and 2 is 13.76s and 17.62 s, respectively. In the first sample, the Karaoke speaker was on and the characteristic audio feedback is clearly heard. In the second file, registered with the speaker off, no feedback is present, but the output volume is much lower.  

Fig. 3 Spectrogram of the second recording showing the presence of the anomalous voice (AV2) after 14 seconds following an initial ``invocation''. The number of audio samples for each FFT segment is 256. 

It is possible to visually analyze sounds by calculating and displaying their spectrograms. These are frequency-time diagrams showing the time distribution of intensity amplitudes of each tone that compose the original sound. Spectrograms are the result of applying the famous “Fast Fourier Transformation” method (FFT in short) to the sampled audio signal. The first recording spectrogram is seen in Fig. 1.  The “anomalous voice” (AV1) is present after about 11 seconds with a spectrum distribution between 1-8 KHz above the characteristic audio feedback (in the range 0.75-1.3KHz and 2.8-3.1KHz). By applying a 76dB flat filter in these ranges, the audio noise is reduced significantly. The filtered anomalous signal waveform in the time interval [11.6,12.75] is seen in Fig. 2.  AV1 sounds like a whispering male voice pronouncing “I see”.

Fig. 4 Audio waveforms of AV2 ("yes") in the indicated interval showing the anomalous voice modulation.

Fig. 3 is the corresponding spectrogram of the second sample where other features are indicated. In particular, there is an initial "invocation'' in Portuguese that can be translated as "tell something to mom'' in the interval 1-2 s. Cracking sounds can be heard between 10-14 s. After 14.5 s, the silence is broken by an unmistakable but very low “yes” distributed mostly in the frequency range 1-2KHz, and whispered by the same male voice of the first recording. A zoomed view of the AV2 audio signal  is seen in Fig. 4 in the time interval [14.75, 15.6] s. 

The original single-channel versions were converted to WAV format, and can be listened here (1) and here (2).  The complete filtered file can be accessed here.

Next post: EVP II (Electronic Voice Phenomena).