I’ve been interested in EVP ever since I heard a noisy tape-recording of a weird voice about fifteen years ago.  What was said was hardly recognisable, but it was strange to hear a ‘voice’ appear from nowhere.

These Electronic Voices are a puzzling phenomenon.  They’re hard to explain in terms of physics, which annoys the scientists immensely, there’s no easy explanation as to how they can get there.

If however you don’t really understand physics they’re easier to accept. because nothing gets in the way, you can believe whatever you like if you don’t have any preconcieved ideas. To believe that EVP are ‘voices from the dead’ you have to propose rather radical changes or extensions to physics as it currently exists.  This doesn’t go down well with scientists who are used to building slowly on what they already know rather than changing it about.

I consider myself to be half a scientist, I studied physics and electronic engineering, but I’ve got no career to worry about so I can think whatever I like.  I don’t have to remain academically credible, or worry about peer pressure.

The examples of voices from Tayport are far and away the best recordings I’ve ever heard.  They’re so clear that I know a lot of people have dismissed them as not being proper recordings, this is a shame because it seems that when you do come up with something better than the distorted stuff that we’re used to it’s branded as ‘too good to be true’.

No-one has any proper explanations for how these phenomena can manifest themselves and we’d all like some, so let’s look at EVP and some of the things people say about it and see if we can get any form of theory together.

One thing that often said about EVP is that the sounds have to be below a certain frequency (usually quoted as about 300Hz) otherwise the people in the room would have heard them. I can’t agree with that assertion.  Sounds as low as 50Hz are easy to hear – everyone can hear the hum of a mains transformer or the buzz from a speaker.  Most people can easily hear down to 20 or 30Hz.  Below that you can’t really carry any voice-type of communication anyway.

Why would a spirit be talking at a low frequency anyway?  If a spirit could talk using air vibrations why would it not talk properly?  Well people say it might exist in some kind of slower time or something.  How so?  It can hear us fine when we ask questions – we don’t sound like unintelligable mice to it.  Anyway, if it was moving slower in time it seems to me that we’d pass it by in a flicker, it certainly wouldn’t be alongside us long enough to talk words.

Still people say that if spirits talked in proper voices those in the room would have heard them, so if proper voices are recorded then they must be from a passer-by, or someone spoke them and didn’t remember, or it’s a hoax.

This sounds all very logical except for one thing. Voice recorders don’t record sounds.  Since the days of wax cylinders nothing has recorded sound, everything these days records electrical signals.  We use a microphone to convert sound vibrations to an electrical signal, and that’s what recorders capture.  My point is that the voices that appear on EVP recordings don’t have to be ‘sound’ – they may never have been sound, we’re not recording sound.

Could they be picked up in the form of interference, from a mobile phone or a transmitter of some sort?   Well, not from most types of transmitters.  Put your mobile phone near a computer or a sound system and what do you hear?   It goes ‘blip blip’ because mobile phones carry speech as a digital signal not as any form of intelligable analogue speech.  You need the decoding circuitry and the microprocessor program in the phone to turn it back into speech – there’s no circuitry in a tape recorder or digital voice capable of doing that.

Police and a most emergency-services radio systems use the same principle, so they won’t cause it.

Taxi or some other analogue radio transmitter?  Maybe.  Just maybe.  It would either have to be very close, like a few metres away, or very powerful.  It’s certainly not going to affect equipment behind decent walls in a basement or in a castle that’s hundreds of metres from a road.  Most transmitters like that don’t cause interference anyway, the conditions have to be exactly right.  If they were and it was a mobile analogue transmitter like a taxi then you might get the odd word if it was moving or complete conversations if it was stationary outside.  They almost always come with background noise.  I have never heard anything like a mobile transmitter conversation appearing unintentionally on any form of recording, in theory it is possible, but in practice it’s just too unlikely.  Anyway the background noise and the content of the conversation would give it away.

When was the last time you were happily listening to your radio or television and heard strange voices breaking through from outside interference?  Probably never, so just forget about the notion that it’s happened at the right time and place to cause an EVP recording.  It is possible, but then so is getting hit by a metorite whilst walking to the bus stop with odd socks on.  People record hundreds of thousands of hours of television programs, live concerts and news broadcasts every week and you never hear any unwanted interference from taxis or transmitters on them.  Face the facts – it doesn’t happen.

People like explanations.  If something has no obvious explanation then they’ll make up something rather than admit that they have no answer.  Often what they make up as a proposed explanation is even more incredulous that the thing they’re trying to explain, but that’s alright, it avoids having to say “I don’t know”.

It seems to me that EVP is most likely to be electromagnetic rather than sound, but I don’t know, can’t prove it yet, and that’s fine for now.  It’s just a theory and it’ll do until something else seems better.

The scientist Richard Feynman used to say “I would rather go through life not knowing than have answers that may be wrong”.  So let’s keep looking until we find an explanation that works, it might not be a comfortable one, but then the truth usually isn’t.

Written by Steve Douglas