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Michael Esposito EVPs

actually, this is complete misinformation this guy is spouting with regards to the equipment. the more expensive the equipment is, the LESS of an effect it has on the audio and the MORE transparent the device becomes. there is NO noise reduction built into the chipsets unless you activate it, any engineer with half a clue would never touch anything that was as destructive to the audio.

the visual equivalent of this is only taking pictures of ghosts with a pinhole camera instead of a nikon D3s

Well I'm glad you're hear to tell us this stuff. I can't stand it when people try to hide behind technical mumbo jumbo like the guest seems to have done. I like your camera analogy.
 
not a problem, glad i could be of help. if anyone has any questions about audio stuff im more than happy to answer them anytime.
 
I think the difficulty with sound within this context, is we enter into the realm of subjectivity vs objectivity. Such as the content being defined by the context, or the context being defined by the content.

Therefore the average audience listening to EVP recordings would be naturally be constrained to their auditory perception defined by their general awareness of the subject and/or physical location, and of course it’s possible connotative significance.

I have never really followed the EVP subject closely but I thought it was a very interesting podcast and how it touches on our interpretation of language and signs convened by its modality. But what’s not to say that ‘language or the recorded voices’ within the context of EVP is the only information that should be encoded, perhaps there is a link that is being overlooked.
 
I was so hoping this show would at least be a partly technical analysis of the possible origins of EVP, but sadly I felt it was not.

I've got over half way into the podcast and from what I have heard, I very much agree with what fold4wrap5 has posted. I am a broadcast engineer - experienced mostly radio frequency stuff, but audio too - and I can’t help thinking Michael Esposito is hiding behind technical mumbo-jumbo. I did not hear any credible technical explanations. If he wanted to convince us of the validity of his work then he should have included some coherent technical content.

For example, he kept mentioning ‘compression’, and at one point said Edison’s equipment had this. What does he mean by compression? Compression of air onto a diaphragm like a microphone, compression of electrical audio signals as used in audio processing for recording and AM (and to a lesser extent FM) radio broadcasts to reduce the dynamic range, or did he mean digital compression as Gene prompted him to explain? And whatever he meant, why should it enhance the EVPs?

This 'micro-sound state' he mentioned - what did he mean? And 'nano seconds of sound'. In a nano second a sound wave travels about 0.343 millionths of a metre. So what? - What IS he trying to say?

And then the Titanic radio stuff. On what frequency was it heard, on what type of equipment, by whom, where and when?

OK, perhaps he is just not familiar with the technical side of the work. Then maybe he should be working with someone who is.

I’ve met someone who believed her dead son was communicating to her via a radio/EVP. I investigated and identified the signal she was hearing (an SSB utility station on an AM radio - sounds weird) but her belief could not be shaken as she said her son had accurately predicted unexpected but minor domestic matters to her regularly. I guess that would convince me too! But unless I get something like “Hey Ian, it’s your Uncle Tom here – the one who died on a bus on the way to the market in 1977” I’m not going to be convinced.

I'm not saying this is all B.S., there is some interesting data - I've just not experienced it 'close up' and Michael Esposito hasn't convinced me at all.

Regards,

Ian
 
I’ve met someone who believed her dead son was communicating to her via a radio/EVP. I investigated and identified the signal she was hearing (an SSB utility station on an AM radio - sounds weird) but her belief could not be shaken as she said her son had accurately predicted unexpected but minor domestic matters to her regularly. I guess that would convince me too!

Wow, excellent real-world example of how powerful belief is in its ability to distort reality and color our perceptions.
 

As with any evidence, it's important to place it in context, and view it light of what was happening at the time it was gathered, as in the clip above.

And now, back to the ether...
 
Wow, puts "Ghost hunters" to shame. Good job Paul. Y'all (That's you and Holly in southern) :) should do more. If you want to that is.
 
Wow, puts "Ghost hunters" to shame. Good job Paul. Y'all (That's you and Holly in southern) :) should do more. If you want to that is.

Thanks. Ghost Cases has run its course (we only intended to do 13 episodes, or 1 season), and Holly is out in BC now working on her burgeoning acting career, but it looks like there's a good chance that I'll be flying solo as the writer / producer / director / host (and probably chief cook and bottle washer) of a new mystery-investigation series in 2011.

---------- Post added at 06:36 AM ---------- Previous post was at 06:36 AM ----------

Genuinely spooky show Paul.

It was even spookier when one was there in person. ;)
 
Ghost stories like this cause these types of questions to spring up in my mind. If people 'ghost' when they die what keeps them on the earth? Are they effected by gravity? The earth is ripping through the firmament at 67,000 mph while it is spinning at 1000 mph! You'd think they'd be floating in our wake somewhere, 'cast into the outer darkness' if you will. And is the afterlife (if there is such a thing) so damn boring that you have to hang around and pine over what happened during life? Its a ... mystery to be sure.
 
Ya know T.O we disagree about certain things spiritually. We come to different conclusions after thinking about it. But, I honestly follow and even have many of the same "debates" in my mind that you appear to have.

Happy Halloween! :)
 
Great thread, and thanks to Paul for the video post. I've been grappling with EVP for a good while now, both theoretically and practically (through experimentation) and I've basically orbited the issue and come back more confounded than when I began. What's interesting to me is the fact the bulk of evidence seems to come from low grade recording, or less than professional grade equipment. Considering the runaway production that goes on in our culture, why is it that EVP or ITC evidence rarely comes from any of these professional environs? Rarely do you hear of a recording engineer complaining of spirits bleeding through in their recordings, and then there's TV, film, radio, etc. - a virtual universe of recording going on at any one moment. I understand that a portion of this could be explained away by the fact that these recordings are not taking place in purpotedly haunted locations, however if you follow EVP research, which utlilizes an increasingly absurd catalog of unproven equipment, spirt manifestation is not limited to "haunted" locations. So, what in the hell is going on here? Is the phenemenon in some way responding to the design of the equipment? Does it originate in the equipment, or i.e. is it a byproduct of the equipment? Is it influenced by the intentions of the observer, or by some undiscovered potential of the individual? Of course there are deeper metaphysical issues to consider if one is to give any creedence to EVP, however, the nuts and bolts aspect may be a door in which to enter into the larger theoretical issues.
 
Considering the runaway production that goes on in our culture, why is it that EVP or ITC evidence rarely comes from any of these professional environs? Rarely do you hear of a recording engineer complaining of spirits bleeding through in their recordings, and then there's TV, film, radio, etc. - a virtual universe of recording going on at any one moment.

Excellent point.
 
To be Honest I was looking forward to listening to this one but unfortunatley I found it to be a little disapointing.

It was like 1 hour and half before you actually got to hear a single EVP and then when you did they were not very good at all.

Also the guest kind of lost me when he started going on about dopple ganger voices ? and he kept going into technicalities when the EVP's should (pardon the pun) speak for themselves if theyre any good.
 
Thank you so much for listening! Fold4wrap5 the vocoder's initial purpose was to compress telephone transmission to run through underwater telephone cable. The vocoder provides a compression /decompression (companding) algorithm to deliver precision transmissions of encoded speech signals sampled at the rate of 8 kHz. Most vocorder's implementation includes independent user-callable functions that perform all of the μ-law and A-law encoding and decoding operations. The most common application for the vocoder is in telephone networks. The vocorder uses pulse code modulation (PCM) to compress, decompress, encode, and decode analog speech, which can then be transmitted and received as binary data. Two forms of companding standards, the µ-law and the A-law, are specified. The vocorder's μ-law compresses frames of 14-bit linear PCM samples into frames of 8-bit logarithmic PCM code words. The vocorder's A-law compresses 13-bit linear PCM samples into 8-bit logarithmic PCM code words.


I like your visual image of granular interpolation, although I would think more like slicing a picture vertically, horizontally and spreading it diagnally! I liken my theories of micro sound as a naturally occuring event than a process (LOL all of you sound engineers think you create everything! kidding of course). More along the lines of Curtis Roads concepts, micro sound and granular inerpolation help explain a world that already exists, not create one from nothing. Dynamics processing on a micro sound or micro time scale affect the amplituted of an audio signal. Such operations as compression of the envelope amplitude of a sound, limiting, expansion, and noise gating are common in sound engineering, especially compression. Specral Dynamics by Erbe (1995) protays this process to windowed spectrum analysis. Looking at microsound as a time slice of the Gabor matrix. Spectral Dynamics applies dynamics processing, including compression individually to each time splice and spectral band. Again, this is reverse engineering, and more exactly reverse sound engineer(ing)! I recommend viewing your waveform in spectral view to get a really good picture of EHF and ELF freqs!


Again, thank you for listening and participating in the forum! Without lively discussion we will never get further down the road!
<M

---------- Post added at 06:55 PM ---------- Previous post was at 06:50 PM ----------

Thank you Tyder001 for listening ! I rather liked the Irish woman's voice better! Ah, well what do I know, I'm not an Irish woman! ;) BTW! I love katherine. We were speaking at a conference together and she kept commenting that she wished that she had met me and my research partner before she wrote Ghost (which I rather like!). She loved the give and take play that my partner (spiritual energy work) and I (scientifically minded) had with each other! Again, thanks for listening!
M

---------- Post added at 07:00 PM ---------- Previous post was at 06:55 PM ----------

Hello Transhuman! Thank you for tuning in to the show! Actually you are very welcome to join me next time I do an investigation. Chris O'Brien has been on many with me and seen the whole process. No, I do not fake EVPs (snicker) and no, I do not set my gear up and walk away. I do carry my field recorder with me when I record (mostly) but it is performed like about every other field recording, if you are Chris Watson recording for the BBC or Jana Winderen recording icebergs in a really far away cold place. Thank you for posting!
M

---------- Post added at 07:07 PM ---------- Previous post was at 07:00 PM ----------

Hello Apprentice! Thank you for listening! You can make your own peizio electic contact mics on the cheep by ripping appart radio shack stuff! As far as my cleaning, I only use a little click pop elimination and just a slight bit of hiss elimination. One of the things that makes EVP such an interesting form of evidence is that it has a very human character to the sound, and you don't want to lose that information that it gives you. Occasionally, I will filter a bit of the subsonic rumble out but not often.
Thanks again for posting and yes please post your hellbroth, I for one am interested!

M

---------- Post added at 07:16 PM ---------- Previous post was at 07:07 PM ----------

Hello again Apprentice, Yes I often use the Zoom (H4). You're exactly correct, to pick a radio interference it would have to be very strong and/or close by. In fact with the amount of noise pollution in the world, it's amazing radio freq even gets to its receiver! Also, Be very careful! Remember most of where we work is in the Hiss. It's like pulling seaweed from a swamp. Sound engineers never get this. Noise and hiss reduction is like burning down the house to get in the door. Even center channel extractor is often too much!
M

---------- Post added at 07:28 PM ---------- Previous post was at 07:16 PM ----------

LOL hello yet again! OK you realize of course frequencies occur naturally in ranges. In other words you can't listen to something recorded at 125 Hz and expect to be hearing 125 Hz. All waves are in range. Hiss is also not contained simply in a noise floor, because of this same concept. (a great experiment to try going into the hiss reduction feature of your software and use a hiss reduction and repeat this process forever) The EVPs are not at the noise floor because the noise floor isn't at the noise floor. LOL let me explain; remember when you were a kid on the beach and decided you were going to dig a hole in the sand near the water? Eventually water would get in the bottom of the hole. to dig the water out digs the hole deeper and more water (from the water table - see where I'm going? he he) would get in the hole. The more hiss you reduce in a file the more deteriorated the file becomes and the higher the noise floor becomes and the more hiss it creates! BTW dB is a measure of pressure, forget pressure focus on frequency!

Thanks! Great thread!

---------- Post added at 07:48 PM ---------- Previous post was at 07:28 PM ----------

Hello Maven! thank you for listening!
LOL not sure if there was much technological mumbo jumbo in there, but maybe I can help you understand what I was saying! Compression is physical. I'm going to try and get this last one in. Here is a ratio example of diaphragm compression ratios for microphones "Apparently, the real differences sonically are the compression ratio and diaphragm material - higher compression ratios are more "focussed" and intense in the midrange, and lower compression ratios are more relaxed sounding. With a 3" diaphragm and a 2" exit, the 850-PB has a lower compression ratio than the 835-PB, with its 1.4" exit. This alters the sonic presentation"

Also, some people said, for example, that a 3" or 4" diaphragm is better to reach low frequencies than a 2"
Edison cylinder phonographs worked off of a diaphragm.

The compression is physical from the source to the ear! LOL I swear I am understood more by medical doctors that sound engineers (who have built bastardised definitions for terms LOL)

The concepts of micro sound theory stray from the common notion that duration and frequency are interrelated. So the length it travels is not related to the duration in length. Again, it does relate to pressure and the sound doesnt carry enough pressure for the ear to pick up the signal.

Hit the net for the Titanic stuff there was a recorded incident a couple years after the Titanic sunk regarding Morse code transmissions.

LOL I am sorry to say that builders know nothing about demolition. From Raudive and Cass and even Von Szalsy in the 30s, sound engineers never understood and always claimed to be of superior technical academic. Gabor, Roads, Emoto and other quantum theorists also had the same problems. I thank you but inviting sound engineers to this kind of a party (like the Pye recording engineers that tested Raudive in close scientific method and concluded nothing) is like inviting butchers to a vegitarian buffet (they just wouldn't get it!)

Thank you so much for participating! I really love the great comments!
M
 
Wow, we hardly ever get show guests in the forum who try to be helpful and explain and clarify their positions. Thanks for such a long and complete explanation!
 
Wow, we hardly ever get show guests in the forum who try to be helpful and explain and clarify their positions. Thanks for such a long and complete explanation!

Hello Underdog and thank you! Unfortunately the way radio interviews are structured very seldom do researchers get a change to fully develop ideas, interact with listeners in a thourough way or in some cases even get to complete a thought! I appreciate every single person on this forum for challenging me and helping me hone my field. Remember, it is the study of the unknown, and I consider myself just a researcher. I don't feel I have any answers, simply personal experiences, observations and research. By that definition everyone on this forum is a participant in this field if they realize it or not! If you guys are kind enough to participate how could I not actively join in on the fun!
 
Hi Michael,

Thanks for the more technical info. I understand the concept of using the vocoder tech now in your context, I'm struggling to see how the encode/decode process reveals these recordings though. How did you come to realise this? I've read the MicroSound book by Curtis and have a fairly large collection of the Mille Plateaux releases and the Kim Cascone so I know the field you are working in. I am genuinely interested in this and I am no way baiting or trolling, I'm just curious as to how you are using these techniques to reveal hidden sounds.
 
Wow, that is great to find more experimental music fans! Kim is a friend of mine, actually we are signed to the same record label, Touch music UK. I recommend all of their artists including Chris Watson (of Caberet Voltaire and The Hafler Trio fame). Also check me out on www.discogs.com I recommendall of the artists that Ive worked with on records! Drop me your addy on email and I will send you a Cd of some of my work! Most of my releases are on Leif Elggren's firework edition Records label out of Stockholm and I also recommend all of his artists also. You might know him from the Sons of God. OK then back to biz! I lost my original reply but I will try and recreate it for you (I must have hit a wrong buttom lol) . What Im attempting to do is use certain physical and quantum sound theories and mechanics in a reverse engineered posture to eplain certain postulates I've developed about our energy when we die. Let me digress for a moment. If we are made up mostly of chemicals (including metals) and electricity (energy) and when we die our decomposition creates more energy (of another kind) all that is left is energy that may have some roughly composit form (based on like energies attrracting). If as Einstein formulated that energy can never be destroyed, that it can only maintain two forms, resting (inert) and Knetic (active), and if Edison's ideas that when we die that energy retains our character, then there should be a persistence of memory encoded on that energy similar to flash memory technology. Not only are our personalities and lifetime memories persistent, but fears, ideology and the memory of mechanical ability such as speaking and walking etc. (by the way I borrowed persistence of memory from Dali's painting Persistence of Memory LOL). So if this cloud like formation od attracted energy, particals of energy attracted by the encoded memory of physical form (See Kirlian Photography and phantom pain studies) Then it must make some use of atmospheric particles to attempt remembered functions. Now our ears do not have enough ability to compress sound lower than roughly 20 Hz etc and even there it needs help from pressure and compression from a physical source (or combination of). So the recorders are able to compress the atmospheric particals at a better rate than our ears. Basically they provide a mechanical compression that neither the source (in this case spirit energy) or the reciever (our ears, physically) can. A nice example of this would be how animals sense storms or earthquakes, tornados etc before we do. So, set about trying to discover mechanics that I could reverse engineer to support my hypothesis. I am using micro sound, the vocoder technology and others we havent touched on to back into my theories. I believe there is enough support out there physically not only to prove this phenomena possible, but to show it isn't such a far fetched idea that weve been using the mechanics of it all along!
 
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