Electronic Voice Phenomena

Electronic voice phenomena entered the paranormal literature through Friedrich Juergenson, a Swedish painter and documentary filmmaker who reported in 1959 that tape recordings he made of birdsong contained faint voices he could not account for, which he came to interpret as communications from the deceased, including, he believed, his own late mother.

Latvian-born psychologist Konstantin Raudive read Juergenson's work, began collaborating with him in 1964, and pursued the research intensively for the following decade, ultimately making and analysing over 100,000 recordings he believed contained discarnate voices, often in multiple languages he knew personally and attributed to specific deceased people he recognised.

Raudive published his findings in Breakthrough, translated into English in 1971, presenting transcripts and testimonials from scientists who had participated in some of his recording sessions, and the book made EVP a recognised, if marginal, claim within the wider survival-of-death literature, later extended by other researchers into more elaborate "instrumental transcommunication" setups using radios, televisions, and eventually computers rather than simple tape recorders.

The core scientific objection to EVP is auditory pareidolia, the well-established psychological phenomenon in which the brain imposes familiar, meaningful patterns, especially speech, onto genuinely ambiguous or random noise, an effect that becomes dramatically stronger once a listener is told in advance what word or phrase to listen for, exactly the way EVP recordings are typically presented and interpreted.

Raudive's own recordings were made with equipment and in settings that critics have noted were not shielded against stray radio-frequency interference, a mundane source capable of producing snatches of actual broadcast speech or music indistinguishable, once faint and degraded, from a mysterious voice; notably, in the rare instance Raudive agreed to record inside a radio-frequency-screened room, he captured no anomalous voices at all. Imants Barusss, a psychologist, published a controlled two-year attempt to replicate EVP recordings in the Journal of Scientific Exploration in 2001, using careful blank-tape and screened-room controls, and found no voices attributable to anything beyond chance noise and ordinary explanation. Mainstream science treats EVP as a case study in how genuinely ambiguous stimuli, presented with a strong prior expectation, will reliably be interpreted as meaningful language by human listeners, rather than as evidence of paranormal communication.