| Dedicated to Public Education about EVP and ITC and the Support of EVP/ITC Experimenters Everywhere | ||||
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| Dedicated to Public Education about EVP and ITC and the Support of EVP/ITC Experimenters Everywhere | ||||
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Research > Research Articles EVP Listening ExperimentPublic Participation Welcome A common complaint from the public is that many Electronic Voice Phenomena (EVP) just sound like noise, and that no one would hear the same words unless they were prompted to do so before hand. The skeptical community likes to refer to this as auditory pareidolia, which simply means that a person will sometimes find meaning where there is none. There are many reasons why EVP are difficult to understand, if you take a few minutes to review the commonly noted characteristics of EVP in A Proposed Wikipedia Entry for EVP, you will see that ... well, that EVP are not normal speech. It is a wonder that they exist at all. People presenting EVP examples to the public usually tell the listener what to expect because even a Class A example can be difficult to understand if the listener has not learned to look for words in odd places. For instance, an excellent technique for examining a possible utterance is to select the suspected wave form and listen to it many times. If words are present to be understood, the listener's mind will sometimes, eventually recognize them. For instance, look at the example, "Think Positively ... instantly away," here. As you can see in the associated screen print of the wave form, the phrase is spoken in short bursts of sound, so select the first one with your sound management program and listen to it over and over until you find, "Think positively." Playing these for the public does not afford the opportunity to teach the listener how to hear EVP and few web site visitors will bother to try so hard. So if you decide to participate in the following online experiment, please spend a little time listening to each example. We are not going to tell you what the examples say, only that each does say something. To participate, just listen to each example in turn and write down what you think is said in the provided window.
Results for EVP Listening Experiment 1 Pareidolia is one of the explanations for EVP offered by the skeptical community. It means mistaking an ordinary thing as being phenomenal. Their point is that the recordings we call EVP are probably not words at all, only sounds mistaken for words. One of the problems in countering this argument is that the words in EVP are too often very hard to hear and are spoken in odd ways. Any EVP phrase can be difficult to understand, as can normal speech heard in noisy conditions. The problem then, is not just to show that the words of EVP are real messages. We also need to find a way to make the point that the listener must accept some responsibility to learn how to listen to EVP. It is, after all, an acquired skill. To answer the claim of pareidolia, we set up an experiment in the Research section of this web site. It contained five unnamed examples and website visitors were asked to write down what they heard for each. They were also asked to tell us if they had studied EVP, and if so, did they believe EVP was phenomenal or mundane. Additional questions were if they were skeptical, a trained scientist or had a non-science degree. After one hundred “qualified” responses, the experiment was stopped because of the time required for processing the results and because we were being overrun by people determined to defeat the experiment. Judging by the computer address, some were coming back a second time, saying they had studied EVP and believed it to be phenomenal and then typing random characters in the response field. By “qualified” we mean that the respondent actually wrote a response for at least one example, and the response was something other than random characters. To determine whether or not EVP can be shown to be true words, rather than imagined patterns in otherwise random noise, we counted the number of words in all five examples. In the “Shut up Vicki, just shut up,” recorded by Vicki Talbott, we counted “shut up” as one word because it is heard that way in normal speech. We then counted how many of the words known to be in each example were included in each response. The highest percentage of correct words for each example was: 42% for the “Shut up” example, 19% for “We keep looking for peace” recorded by Lisa, 43% for “Where’s Mom” recorded by Martha Copeland, 35% for “Hi, Mom” recorded by Teri Daner and 15% for “Thanks, thanks for the money” recorded by Vicki Talbott. Respondents correctly identified 609 of the possible 1900 words or 32%. People who said they had studied EVP and believed it to be phenomenal scored 34% correct with thirty-six respondents. Only eight people said they had studied EVP and believed it to be mundane, but this group was able to get 43% of the words correct. Twenty-eight skeptics actually tried and did pretty well with 24% correct interpretations. Eleven scholastically-trained scientists scored an accuracy of 32% and eight scholastically-trained people who were not scientists scored an average of 32% correct. Nine respondents did not indicate their background, but together averaged 25% correct. This is just one experiment, and with only 100 samples, it is rather small. It was fully blind, in that there were no clues as to what the examples said. If EVP is just noise, then none, certainly not more than a few percent of the words, should be understood. However, the results indicate that some EVP examples are understood without prompting, and that the ability to understand an EVP is improved with training. All five examples are amongst the best we have heard and a large percentage of people we play them for under controlled conditions agree that they are very clear. So, one important message of this experiment for all of us is that what we think is very clear, is not necessarily clear to the average person. We would be happy to sponsor other such website experiments. It is necessary that you design your experiment, analyze the data and write a report, but we would be happy to help you set it up.
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