The "Ghost Voices" in Recordings: How Electronic Voice Phenomenon Comes About

In many paranormal programs, investigators pull out a recorder and say, "Listen, this is the voice of a ghost."

This sort of thing is called Electronic Voice Phenomenon, abbreviated as EVP. It dates back to 1959, when a Swedish painter and filmmaker named Jürgenson was recording bird songs in the countryside. When playing it back, he heard human voices on the tape, one of which sounded like someone calling his name. He believed it was his deceased relatives. Later he wrote a book called Voices from the Universe, and for many years, one person with one recorder made countless recordings.

Afterwards, Raudive, a Latvian psychologist, popularized the phenomenon. He used radio static and microphone background noise to record over one hundred thousand segments, claiming they contained the voices of the dead. These recordings were later published as books and sold very well in Britain and Germany.

However, later research found that most EVP is white noise, radio interference, or the inherent noise of recording equipment itself; sometimes it is signals from nearby radio stations picked up by the magnetic head. Combined with the fact that listeners are told in advance that "there is a sentence here," the brain will "hear" that sentence from the noise. In psychology, this is called auditory pareidolia, the same principle as seeing a face in the clouds.

You can try it yourself: find a segment of noise, and without telling your friend what is in it, let them listen—they won't hear anything. Then tell them there is a sentence saying "How are you," play it again, and they will be able to hear it.

However, some people say that some recordings, without anyone telling them beforehand, result in listeners hearing the same sentence. Claims of this kind have not been stably replicated in any other laboratory to date.

So to this day, EVP remains a topic among paranormal enthusiasts and has not been recognized by the scientific community.

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