White Noise

[Paul Burridge]

Greetings, friends,

On the subject of this new film, the plot of which you will all no
doubt be aware of by now, has anyone ever experienced unaccountable
EVP on any recording they've ever made? I have, but cannot in all
honesty ascribe it to anything supernatural. From having trawled
through Google, however, it appears quite a few folks *are* believers.
What thinketh the Panel on the matter?

p.

 

[Brad Albing]

Greetings, friends,

[snip]unaccountable EVP [snip] What thinketh the Panel on the matter?

I believe it's caused by the tendency of the brain to try to fit a
pattern to the chaos - even if there isn't really a pattern there. This
is (e.g.) akin to the phenomena of coming home to one's empty house and,
hearing nothing but the whoosh of the blower on the furnace, being sure
that the radio is on (playing music or a DJ's voice). Upon attending to
the "radio," one realizes it is not on and there really is no
discernable intelligence contained in the noise.

 

[John Larkin]

Greetings, friends,

On the subject of this new film, the plot of which you will all no
doubt be aware of by now, has anyone ever experienced unaccountable
EVP on any recording they've ever made? I have, but cannot in all
honesty ascribe it to anything supernatural. From having trawled
through Google, however, it appears quite a few folks *are* believers.
What thinketh the Panel on the matter?

p.

Tape head preamps make pretty good AM detectors, and erase heads
aren't perfect. Plus, there are lots of loonies around.

John

 

[john jardine]

Greetings, friends,

On the subject of this new film, the plot of which you will all no
doubt be aware of by now, has anyone ever experienced unaccountable
EVP on any recording they've ever made? I have, but cannot in all
honesty ascribe it to anything supernatural. From having trawled
through Google, however, it appears quite a few folks *are* believers.
What thinketh the Panel on the matter?

p.

Not unaccountable. I can feed white noise to headphones and select a
particular melody and then listen to it as it surfaces out of the noise.
Same process as running noise through a Hi Q filter. A sinewave come out as
if from nowhere.
regards
john

 

[John Larkin]

Not unaccountable. I can feed white noise to headphones and select a
particular melody and then listen to it as it surfaces out of the noise.
Same process as running noise through a Hi Q filter. A sinewave come out as
if from nowhere.
regards
john

Write a little program to set random white pixels on a black screen.
You'll see amazing patterns... lines, arcs, open patches, clusters.

John

 

[Bob Stephens]

It happened to me once on an old TEAC 4 - track tape recorder. We were
bouncing vocal tracks back and forth to free up a track, and all of a
sudden a clear, basso-profundo voice chimed in singing right along with us
(two tenors)- pretty eerie at first. I have no idea where it came from,
subharmonic I guess.


Bob

 

[John Woodgate]

I read in sci.electronics.design that John Larkin <jjlarkin@highSNIPland
THIStechPLEASEnology.com> wrote (in <h6bot01i8rcgkp3ft8gd1cvkjhua3bc4eu@
4ax.com>) about 'White Noise', on Wed, 5 Jan 2005:

Tape head preamps make pretty good AM detectors, and erase heads
aren't perfect. Plus, there are lots of loonies around.

If this is about 'spirit messages' from tape recorders, there was a guy
who made much of this in the 1970s (IIRC). A sort of former-day Geller.
The spirit messages came in Swedish, German and an obscure language
called Latgalian, which his mother spoke. Very convenient if the
artefact was barely identifiable!

I heard these 'messages' in the 1960s when trying to make a kit Truvox
recorder work after the guy who bought it for a local club gave up. It
did work, after a while, which was a reasonable outcome considering that
all the paperwork had been 'lost'.

If you recorded a blank tape with maximum mic gain, the resulting noise
contained snatches of text and sometimes a soprano singing a few notes.
What was *really* magic was that the messages were different every time
you replayed the recording. (;-)

 

[john jardine]

Write a little program to set random white pixels on a black screen.
You'll see amazing patterns... lines, arcs, open patches, clusters.

John

Exactly!.

It's our pattern sensitised neural nets at work.
regards
john

 

[Paul Burridge]

Exactly!.

It's our pattern sensitised neural nets at work.

You mean as in our evolved tendency to make faces out of abstract
patterns? I guess so, in many cases, that's true. However, the BBC did
play one recording (on an item concerning this subject) on Radio 4
this morning that had to be something else. It was definitely a
woman's voice that seemed to be saying "lie down" but I couldn't be
sure as the radio I happened to be listening to it on was one of these
tiny, tinny, Japanese jobbies and didn't do the Beeb's broadcast
quality tapes justice. Anyone else hear it?

 

[john jardine]

You mean as in our evolved tendency to make faces out of abstract
patterns? I guess so, in many cases, that's true. However, the BBC did
play one recording (on an item concerning this subject) on Radio 4
this morning that had to be something else. It was definitely a
woman's voice that seemed to be saying "lie down" but I couldn't be
sure as the radio I happened to be listening to it on was one of these
tiny, tinny, Japanese jobbies and didn't do the Beeb's broadcast
quality tapes justice. Anyone else hear it?

Once it's been recorded for transmision then the effect is 'locked' and
we'll always hear it the same way.
But it's the original source reproducing equipment that will add variability
to every play. It's own noise artefacts randomly modulating existing noise.
Make a number of recordings from it and then select out and record the
finest example of ghost-speak and the film studios and TV will fall over
themselves to buy it. As John W. mentioned, the odd effect was different
every time they listened.

Anyway I'm losing confidence in the ability of the Beeb to report anything
technical. If it's not some rap artiste or DJ being interviewed on their
fine body of work or some kiddy singer or Z list personality, then the Beeb
haven't a f***ing clue.

regards
john

 

[[email protected]]

I saw the trailer for the movie, and it piqued my curiosity. So I
Googled it the next day and turned up some interesting reading and
audio samples. There seem to be two main schools of thought. One holds
that EVP can be impressed directly on an audio tape (but can only be
heard on playback, not actually heard "in the air" at the time of
recording). The other maintains that a "carrier" of some sort must be
generated, and the spirits modulate this carrier somehow (AM seems
popular) and the intelligence is recovered by some process of
demodulation. Then again, I suppose that the bias oscillator in a tape
recorder could also be supplying a carrier that's amplitude-modulated
by some external force acting upon it.

I was amused to find one site that offered a schematic for a detector
you could add to your gear to make it more sensitive: a diode and a
coil. In other words, a crystal set... guaranteed to pull voices out of
the air for sure!

Some of the audio samples I heard were pretty obviously random noise
upon which wishful thinking had forced some kind of meaning. ("If you
slow down these gurgles and bleeps and play them backwards, and apply a
narrow bandpass filter, you can clearly hear the voice say 'hey
dude'"). Then again, some other samples were distinct words, albeit
faint, enough to creep you out if you entertain the possibility that
the recordings could be genuine and not man-made.

Is it for real? Only the dead know for sure.

 

[Ian]

You mean as in our evolved tendency to make faces out of abstract
patterns? I guess so, in many cases, that's true. However, the BBC did
play one recording (on an item concerning this subject) on Radio 4
this morning that had to be something else. It was definitely a
woman's voice that seemed to be saying "lie down" but I couldn't be
sure as the radio I happened to be listening to it on was one of these
tiny, tinny, Japanese jobbies and didn't do the Beeb's broadcast
quality tapes justice. Anyone else hear it?

Hi Paul:

I didn't hear the program, however if you would post the program name
and approximate time maybe we could all hear it using the Beeb's short
term archiving.

Regards
Ian

 

[Rich The Philosophizer]

Greetings, friends,

[snip]unaccountable EVP [snip] What thinketh the Panel on the matter?

I believe it's caused by the tendency of the brain to try to fit a
pattern to the chaos - even if there isn't really a pattern there. This
is (e.g.) akin to the phenomena of coming home to one's empty house and,
hearing nothing but the whoosh of the blower on the furnace, being sure
that the radio is on (playing music or a DJ's voice). Upon attending to
the "radio," one realizes it is not on and there really is no
discernable intelligence contained in the noise.

You'd be surprised what an empty factory can say at 3 AM. ;-)

Cheers!
Rich

 

[Paul Burridge]

Hi Paul:

I didn't hear the program, however if you would post the program name
and approximate time maybe we could all hear it using the Beeb's short
term archiving.

The 'Today' programme, BBC Radio 4 on Thursday 6th Jan. The item was
broadcast etween 8.15 and 9.00am.

 

[Terry Pinnell]

Hi Paul:

I didn't hear the program, however if you would post the program name
and approximate time maybe we could all hear it using the Beeb's short
term archiving.

It was just under 7 minutes, available at present from the short term
archive
http://www.bbc.co.uk/radio4/today/listenagain/thursday.shtml
with the link '0828 Electronic Voice Phonomena'.

(Do hope the beeb's spelling standards aren't reflected in that!)

 

[Ben Bradley]

I'd heard of the name, and at least it's not a political movie (!).
(ISTR some political pundit using the term "white noise" to refer to
some other pundits). So I looked it up, there a very short plot
description here:
http://imdb.com/title/tt0375210/plotsummary
and lots of "user reviews" here:
http://imdb.com/title/tt0375210/usercomments

I googled for it, found out what "Electronic Voice Phenomena" is,
and geez... didn't I just mention Art Bell somewhere? Yes, in the "Did
we ever go to the moon???" thread in sci.astro.amateur.

Tape head preamps make pretty good AM detectors, and erase heads
aren't perfect.

Speak of the devil, this recent news article has some interesting
history regarding a faulty erase head:

http://www.oanow.com/servlet/Satell...rticle&cid=1031779976767&path=!news!localnews

And as far as such "phenomena" in electronic equipment, I once
heard a CB radio transmission, apparently from a taxi cab (this was
the 1970's), playing LOUDLY through a transistor guitar amp. Radio
interference happens all too often, as many posters here can attest.


I suppose the question reduces to "Well, what if mundane things
such as unwanted AM rectification and partially erased tape are ruled
out?" and my short answer is I just don't believe it.

Plus, there are lots of loonies around.

A book I really enjoyed on the subject is "In Search of the Light:
The Adventures of a Parapsychologist" by Susan Blackmore. These Amazon
reviews sum it up fairly well, though I should write my own:
http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/tg/detail/-/1573920614
What I got out of the book was the power of belief - the belief in
paranormal phenomena by all the researchers, and that hard evidence of
some phenomenon was "just around the corner." In traditional
scientific studies, these biases would be very bad. They're bad here
too, but you would think that if there were "something there" to be
found, these would be the people to find it and it could later be
verified by researchers with less bias and better methods.
In a strict scientific sense you cannot prove the absence of
something ("Absence of evidence is not evidence of absense"), and it
seems the author ends the book still having hope, if "not knowing."
But it sure helped me dispell any possible belief or "curiosity" I may
have had in that stuff.

 

[Ben Bradley]

Once it's been recorded for transmision then the effect is 'locked' and
we'll always hear it the same way.
But it's the original source reproducing equipment that will add variability
to every play. It's own noise artefacts randomly modulating existing noise.

A good tape recorder will have playback electronics that generates
substantially less noise than any tape it plays back. I'm not saying
the original was played back on a 'good' recorder, though...

Make a number of recordings from it and then select out and record the
finest example of ghost-speak and the film studios and TV will fall over
themselves to buy it. As John W. mentioned, the odd effect was different
every time they listened.

I have no doubt that the perceptions of a recording of random noise
can be different every time it's played, even if it's the exact same
thing played every time (record it to a CDR and it plays back in any
decent player, and and any truly varying noise background will be 90dB
below the playback "signal").
Both the perceptions and the actual noise can vary, but at least we
can control for the actual noise.

Anyway I'm losing confidence in the ability of the Beeb to report anything
technical. If it's not some rap artiste or DJ being interviewed on their
fine body of work or some kiddy singer or Z list personality, then the Beeb
haven't a f***ing clue.

That's a shame, I've heard good things about BBC news over the
years, that they were the last bastion of good news reporting. It
seems I and many others became disillusioned of US news sources years
or decades ago, if we ever thought they were reliable.

 

[John Woodgate]

I read in sci.electronics.design that Terry Pinnell <terrypinDELETE@THES

'0828 Electronic Voice Phonomena'.

(Do hope the beeb's spelling standards aren't reflected in that!)

It's a pun so weak that even I wouldn't commit it.

 

[Rich Grise]

I read in sci.electronics.design that Terry Pinnell <terrypinDELETE@THES


It's a pun so weak that even I wouldn't commit it.

Eek. I didn't even spot it until your response here made me relook it.
I give it at least a four. ;-)

Cheers!
Rich