All right. Back on focus.
EVP recordings, for those who don't know, are Electronic Voice Phenomena recordings, collected by ghost-hunters in an attempt to establish the existence of life after death. Simply put, the hunter in question wanders around a "haunted" site with a tape/digital recorder...recording. Then they play it back to try to find voices and sounds that may be supernatural. (This is a really simplified explanation, btw) My problem with using this to carry out so-called scientific research is that not enough control elements are used in the making of the recordings. Sound, you see, travels faster and farther through solids and liquids than through air--ie, walls. Recording devices can also be much more sensitive to normal sounds the hunter may not have heard. I have listened to a number of recordings, some made by myself, and, although intrigued, if not creeped out, by some, I am not fully convinced that they prove much of anything.
My new theory is based upon the variable capacitors used within radio receivers. I am wondering if many of the recorded voices and sounds are not merely stray radio waves--read electro-magnetic waves--that are picked up by something in the microphone that is acting as a variable ac capacitor. In other words, a frequency filter, allowing certain frequencies in and blocking others--the same way a radio tuner does. Only in the case of the recorder, the stray frequency is only partialy filtered out/in--sort of like how, on an old dial turner, when you tuned closer to the station you desired, it starts to come through all sporadic, full of static, distant.
What this implies is that the recorders are not necessarily picking up supernatural voices/sounds, but merely stray, fragmented radio signals. Still, this begs the question of why aren't random bits of music then filtered through, not just voices, et al?
On the other hand, since radio waves are just electro-magnetic waves, which are all around us, could it not be argued that EVP recorders are picking up "signals" that are merely electromagnetic leakage, perhaps from the after-life or another plane? I'm not a big fan of the idea proposed by many hunters that ghosts reside in other, parallel dimensions--the likes of which many hunters argue are "proven" to exist by quantum theory--but evidence of some sort of electromagnetic leakage could very well be step in that direction. Granted, not a step I'm happy about since most of the hunters professing these theories seem to have learned quantum mechanics from "Alice in Quantum Land," but I'd like to think I have an open mind.
Okay, class dismissed. Hello? Hmmmm....
EVP recordings, for those who don't know, are Electronic Voice Phenomena recordings, collected by ghost-hunters in an attempt to establish the existence of life after death. Simply put, the hunter in question wanders around a "haunted" site with a tape/digital recorder...recording. Then they play it back to try to find voices and sounds that may be supernatural. (This is a really simplified explanation, btw) My problem with using this to carry out so-called scientific research is that not enough control elements are used in the making of the recordings. Sound, you see, travels faster and farther through solids and liquids than through air--ie, walls. Recording devices can also be much more sensitive to normal sounds the hunter may not have heard. I have listened to a number of recordings, some made by myself, and, although intrigued, if not creeped out, by some, I am not fully convinced that they prove much of anything.
My new theory is based upon the variable capacitors used within radio receivers. I am wondering if many of the recorded voices and sounds are not merely stray radio waves--read electro-magnetic waves--that are picked up by something in the microphone that is acting as a variable ac capacitor. In other words, a frequency filter, allowing certain frequencies in and blocking others--the same way a radio tuner does. Only in the case of the recorder, the stray frequency is only partialy filtered out/in--sort of like how, on an old dial turner, when you tuned closer to the station you desired, it starts to come through all sporadic, full of static, distant.
What this implies is that the recorders are not necessarily picking up supernatural voices/sounds, but merely stray, fragmented radio signals. Still, this begs the question of why aren't random bits of music then filtered through, not just voices, et al?
On the other hand, since radio waves are just electro-magnetic waves, which are all around us, could it not be argued that EVP recorders are picking up "signals" that are merely electromagnetic leakage, perhaps from the after-life or another plane? I'm not a big fan of the idea proposed by many hunters that ghosts reside in other, parallel dimensions--the likes of which many hunters argue are "proven" to exist by quantum theory--but evidence of some sort of electromagnetic leakage could very well be step in that direction. Granted, not a step I'm happy about since most of the hunters professing these theories seem to have learned quantum mechanics from "Alice in Quantum Land," but I'd like to think I have an open mind.
Okay, class dismissed. Hello? Hmmmm....
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haha, you geek! uhhhh, you know math and stuff.
[Edited on Apr 21, 2003]