The Inaudible Becomes Audible: A Short Guide to Paranormal Audio

In the early 1920’s, Thomas Edison, spurred on by the spiritualist movement that was in vogue, set about making a device that would communicate with the dead. While today such claims would be quickly dismissed in most circles as charlatanism, in the early 20’s the media, partly due to the importance of Edison’s previous inventions, embraced them. Despite his successes and presumably boundless ego, his invention was never completed by the time of his death in 1931.

Edison was never alone in his beliefs that the "next world" could be contacted through electromagnetic means. A colleague of Edison’s, Sir William Crookes, the inventor of the cathode ray tube, certainly believed him. Leon Theremin was even convinced that the dead could be revived. And it isn’t much of a stretch to believe that energy or radio waves, that which constantly surrounds us yet isn’t visible to the human eye, may contain clues to at least a few mysteries.

Strangely, the years after Edison’s death found little advancement in the attempts to harness spirit voices. There were several reports of Edison himself appearing at séances giving specific directions on how to complete his machine, though one would assume the participants must have yawned at that suggestion seeing as how they were already speaking to a spirit. In fact, it wasn’t until 1959 that a retired Swedish opera singer and successful artist named Friederich Jürgenson made a discovery the ramifications of which are still being grappled with and argued about. Jürgenson was bird watching with his wife and had brought a tape recorder with him to capture birdcalls. While examining the tape, he heard a strange roaring noise and a low voice speaking Norwegian. In fact, as Jürgenson listened closer, he heard a trumpet sound, and the voice spoke about "bird songs in the night". Figuring his radio inside his house was interfering, he went inside to find it was off.

Waiting until nighttime, Jürgenson stayed up late in his country attic with his tape recorder, waiting for some kind of sign. His lamp began to flicker, and he turned on his recorder. When he examined the tape the next morning, he listened closely and beneath the roar, he heard the male voice again, uttering fragments like "Churchill", and "Friedrich, you are being observed…"Over the next few days Jürgenson came to the conclusion that spirits were communicating with him, and set about recording, studying and cataloguing for the rest of his life.

He called it "EVP", or Electronic Voice Phenomena, and here is the precise moment where one has to make the decision whether to adopt a wholly cynical stance, or at least give Jürgenson some benefit of the doubt. It’s a difficult situation to rationalize, and even Jürgenson in his book Voice Transmissions With the Deceased tends to sound a tad cracked. For instance, on his second day of recording his mysterious voice fragments, he recognized a disembodied voice humming the hit tune "Volare" and remarked:

I thought it fitted perfectly, because if anyone could fly, it would be you my invisible friends!

Jürgenson communicated with and recorded his "invisible friends" for a good three years before he eventually shared his discovery with the public at a press conference. Naturally, the response was callous, though interest was sparked with other parapsychologists, namely a Latvian philosopher and writer named Dr. Konstantin Raudive. Raudive met extensively with Jürgenson and decided that not only was Jürgenson and his methods undeniably sound, but that it was the greatest discovery of the twentieth century. Indeed, he must have been impressed with Jürgenson's obsessive dedication to annotating and cataloguing virtually every encounter he had with his voices - culminating in several hundred hours of material by the time of his death in 1987. Raudive himself recorded over 25,000 examples until his death in 1974.

The basic methods to record EVP haven't changed since Jürgenson and Raudive conducted their experiments:

Method #1: Set up a tape-recorder and a decent microphone in a quiet room, introduce yourself, and record silence.

Method #2: Set up a tape-recorder attached to a simple diode (which enhances a radio-like 'white-noise' sound, though it's debatable whether it is strong enough to pick up a station) and microphone, and record.

Method #3: Turn your radio to an "in-between" station, and record. Jürgenson claimed that a spirit voice told him to "use the radio" in 1960, and after trying he found that yielded the best EVP results.

According to Jürgenson and Raudive, these simple experiments yield supernatural results. The catch? It takes an extraordinary amount of practice to listen, a delicate ear to decipher what is indeed spirits talking, and a robust and varied lexicon to translate the languages heard. The voices often appeared layered beneath the noise as a whisper, or as a completely audible fragment of speech, sometimes in "polyglot", a Jürgenson term meaning a combined form of several languages.

In Raudive's 1971 book Breakthrough (originally titled in German as The Inaudible Becomes Audible) he carefully attacks every skeptic's immediate thoughts upon learning of each method. For instance, he discusses the necessity of finding a true "in-between" station, and not one with radio voices leaking through. He describes practicing his method before many scientists and members of the clergy. However, those within the parapsychology community for several reasons, the first being the fact that a large percentage of the voice fragments were nonsensical, criticized his excruciatingly detailed book. Examples like "Ortega! Party becomes Ortega!" "The day is long. Tuesday perhaps sun." and "What for? On the lawn." added fuel to their fire. However, some argued that if they truly are spirit voices, there is no rule that suggests that everything that they say will be miraculous, or fraught with higher meaning. Some have explained that in actuality it could be simple human subjectivity in order to rationalize phenomena that there may be a scientific explanation for.

Possibly the greatest blow came in 1974 from the British Journal of the Society of Psychical Research, where they ran an in-depth study of Raudive's findings. Author D.J. Ellis discerned that in no way could Raudive's methods be sufficiently proven because there was evidence that the disembodied voices could be, in the case of the microphone recordings, involuntary utterances of human origin. Ellis also noted that Raudive's hearing was found to be rather poor. In the cases of voices emanating from the radio, he let it be known that there wasn't sufficient evidence to prove that they were not emanating from normal broadcasts - they were not clear enough to judge paranormality. In fact, Jürgenson believed that spirit voices often were hidden in normal broadcasts, making studying them all the more difficult and suspicious.

Nevertheless, Breakthrough brought EVP into the homes of many believers, and since its publication, EVP societies have cropped up in America, the Netherlands, Germany and other countries, with listeners essentially following the same methods Jürgenson and Raudive mapped out in their initial studies, with some upgrades in equipment as well as a method to record EVP via home computer. However, the garbled results haven't improved...though they are creepy enough to make one wonder.

In the late-90's an elegant CD compilation (now out of print) was released of original EVP recordings, including some made by Raudive, entitled The Ghost Orchid, with material supplied by PARC, the Parapsychic Acoustic Research Cooperative. In 2000, PARC themselves released a second beautifully designed CD collection of Friederich Jürgenson's recordings entitled From the School of Audioscopic Research. And as of this writing, SubRosa records has just released a compendium of
original Raudive recordings, accompanied by various remixes by contemporary artists, entitled Konstantin Raudive: The Voices of the Dead. By and large the Jürgenson recordings sound like, well, snatches of shortwave interceptions or everyday conversations with unbearable treble levels. However, every once in a while one slips by that sounds completely otherworldly and striking. A screech, a mumble, a whisper - recordings that, from whatever environment they emanated, sound inexplicably beautiful. This is where EVP succeeds despite its dubious origins and transcends into material that shouldn't be explained away, remaining truly paranormal.

EVP remains the main source of paranormal audio today, though there are a number of available recordings of natural or man-made phenomena so hidden from normal human experience that they produce an otherworldly effect more powerful than EVP. In the early 90's, NASA quietly released a series of five CDs of the actual sounds of space recorded by Voyager II as it floated through the outer reaches of our galaxy, specifically from Jupiter to Neptune.

Disguised as a series of "new-age" looking releases with cheap graphics, each volume was titled Symphonies of the Planets. Since space itself is a vacuum and there isn't any audible sound there, Voyager II was equipped with mechanisms to record the electromagnetic vibrations in space. According to the notes, the sounds were caused by solar wind interacting with a planet's magnetosphere, from the magnetosphere alone, from radio waves careening between a planet and the inner surface of it's atmosphere, general electromagnetic noise from space itself, and charged particle interactions between planets, their moons, solar wind, or the planet's rings. The result is what sounds like a soft, churning engine, coupled with descending whale cries and soft thuds. Imagining that we are somehow connected to these noises without being able to actually hear them opens up the possibilities of what exists in paraspace, perhaps in other dimensions. Much to the chagrin of some music buffs, these discs lend interstellar credence to the ambient sound movement. Unfortunately, these too are long out of print.

In northern California there lives a radio pioneer named Stephen McGreevy, who has been the most successful in recording the earth's natural electromagnetic phenomena. An unassuming man you might mistake for your high school chemistry teacher, McGreevy developed a radio receiver that was highly sensitive to VLF (Very Low Frequency) transmissions, those being the sounds that occur at the very beginning of the shortwave dial, up to .110 kHz. Listening to shortwave is a dying phenomenon in the United States, it would seem. Most kids these days aren't studying hard to pass the ham radio license test, or are tinkering in the basement with Dad's circuit boards. But shortwave carries an extraordinary amount of information, from radio-teletype, to weather beacons, to person-to-person communications, to Morse code conversations, to news broadcasts from around the world. Although companies like Clear Channel are reaping millions by monopolizing our FM airwaves, they have nothing on the power of shortwave. Because shortwave utilizes the Earth's ionosphere, it can carry signals the farthest, and to the greatest number of people. So, where has it gone?

McGreevy has helped bring back some magic to shortwave listening and to radio hobbyism in general. He had always been interested in the study of VLF radio, and having developed his receiver, set about recording the mysterious noises that occur at that end of the dial. When first listening to a McGreevy recording, you are immediately pushed to annoyance at times by an incessant crackle, like someone crumpling a potato chip bag - until you realize that the crackle is actually thousands of "sferics", or lightning strikes occurring within a 3000 mile radius of the receiver. Often coupled with the crackle is a soft, cascading chorus of "Whistlers", the cause of which hasn't been fully proven. They may indeed be lightning strokes that rebounded out into space and bounced into the opposite hemisphere, causing the short whistle noise - and it's possible that they rebound back once again to their inception point making a lengthy whistle occur. Sometimes whistlers appear, and sometimes they don't - no one really knows why. Regardless, lightning and whistlers are just the beginning of McGreevy's captured sounds.

McGreevy traveled to remote parks in the northern hemisphere (Alberta, Manitoba, etc.) for his best results. He's recorded many examples of the "Dawn Chorus", which is a slew of other-worldly chirps and tweets usually appearing early in the morning due to a heavy magnetic storm of charged particles being released from the sun towards Earth and making our magnetosphere distort (causing a lot of expensive satellites to get heavily radiated). Probably his most most fascinating recordings are of the "Aurural Chorus". Not only does the aurora borealis produce jaw-dropping displays of color and light, but also within the auroral zone ovals near the poles, they emit a chirping chorus, a hiss and arc-descending whooshing sounds over the VLF airwaves.

Electric Enigma: The VLF Recordings of Stephen P. McGreevy was an obsessively detailed and informative 2-disc set released by Irdial Discs in London in 1997, and is now another out of print collector's item, but worth searching out at all costs because of it's nice design and lengthy explanations of all noises. Thankfully, through McGreevy's own website you can order his CD Auroral Chorus II: The Music of the Magnetosphere, which includes some excellent stereo recordings.

One cannot get far in discussing mysterious sounds and audio phenomena without discussing the oft mentioned, hopelessly out of print and absolutely amazing 4-CD set entitled The Conet Project: Recordings of Shortwave Numbers Stations. When I was a geeky 7th grader sitting upstairs in my room with my Yaesu shortwave logging broadcasts from Taiwan, Ghana and various other locations, I came across these mysterious stations broadcasting sets of numbers in disconcerting voices. For lack of a better description, I thought they sounded like they were coming from outer space. I logged them dutifully and even transcribed several, but they remained a mystery to my little mind until I ordered this CD set in 1997.

Nothing can really prepare a listener for the shattering notion that these stations, these hundreds of eerie voices speaking in many languages, traveling across thousands of miles, are actually transmissions by government spy and security agencies sent directly to their operatives. There are only two people in the world that can understand any one message - the person sending it and the receiver. An agency will broadcast a specific set of numbers that the operative will have the code to — after the code is used once, it's thrown away. It's called a One Time Pad. To every other listener they are a complete puzzle, and with the amount of Numbers Stations currently broadcasting regularly, it’s painfully clear that we, the regular citizens of the world, know nothing. It's a human-created paraspace that is absolutely untouchable. The FBI, CIA, KGB, Mossad, Interpol and other agencies use the shortwave format because it’s not only simple, even archaic now, but it has such a lengthy range. Sophisticated equipment could detect the location of a transmitter - the top of an Embassy building or an Army base for example - but this just confirms what is already surmised, that numbers stations are a secret business.

The Conet Project contains examples of many of the most interesting Numbers Stations, largely recorded during the early 90's. It's been noted that some stations broadcast more during times of war, or military escalation. It's also true that some stations inexplicably disappear completely. Some disappear, then inexplicably reappear, sometimes years later! Therefore, although these stations are broadcasting indecipherable messages, The Conet Project may be an accurate, albeit obscured, picture of the first world's political climate at the time. Without a drop of sarcasm, I believe it may even prove to be one of the most important documents of the 20th century.

The voices - the computerized human voices methodically dictating sets of 5-number strings are so maniacally covert it might be enough to put a Numbers Station monitor into a permanent state of paranoia. Then again, it might take an especially paranoid person to monitor them to begin with. Sometimes it's the shrill voice of a child yelping the numbers, then there's the "sexy lady" station, other times it's a droning male voice reading numbers in Spanish...or Czech...or German...or Russian. Sometimes a German station will broadcast in English. Sometimes an American station will broadcast only in Spanish. As a listener, one cannot separate these distant, emotionless voices from their potential meaning. Thankfully, there's ENIGMA, a journal and a society of sorts that monitors and catalogs Numbers Stations. Their cataloguing and station ids were used in the preparation of The Conet Project. The disc set comes with a 74-page booklet with essays and detailed information on each station, whom is suspected of broadcasting the station, and some information schedules. The producers warn that in some countries it is illegal to listen to Numbers Stations, and let it be known that this is not The X-Files. They are really out there, and they might be your neighbors.

Returning full-circle to the paranormality of human speech, one of the more Freudian releases of the past few years is Dion McGregor Dreams Again, released by Tzadik and still available. McGregor was a peculiar gentleman of New York who was trying to make it as a songwriter in the early 60's when it was discovered by a succession of roommates that he dreamed out loud. Not only did he talk in his sleep, but he actually narrated his dreams. As McGregor was known as kind of a cut-up, many presumed that this was an elaborate joke, and in fact the content of his dreams tended to have a biting, if hallucinatory sense of humor. But as more and more Doubting Thomases were brought into the fold including a record producer, everyone eventually agreed that McGregor was fast asleep while jabbering away. So, his roommate began recording.

"I know it's a net - a net is what's called for. You'll get it. Now come on, follow me. I saw it, I saw it! We have to add it to my collection. Looklooklook! Over there under that giant palm leaf...now don't frighten it for God's sake...it's just what we need to complete my collection. Look at that! Ohhhh, look at that...you got it?! Oh, you got it, you got it, you got it, you got it, you got it! Ugnnh! Let me see! Let me see! Ohhhhh, handle him carefully...Unnghhhh! Ohhhhhhhh! It's a baby griffin! Look! A baby griffin! A baby griffin! Oh, now I'm complete! I'm complete! Ohhhhh!" - Dion McGregor, excerpted from "The Collection"

Over the course of several years, his roommate had succeeded in recording shelves and shelves of tapes featuring McGregor's uncensored id. This was a first and perhaps a last in recording history, with a subject dramatically - even gleefully - dictating his visions in the dream state. Sometimes you can hear McGregor's voice slow down and become slurred as if hitting a successive level of fatigue. At other moments it truly seems as if he's awake and about to be attacked, with his narration ending in a dramatic, horrifying scream - then you're left with that bedroom silence with the distant beeps of the late-night First Avenue traffic outside. In the early 60's Decca released an EP of Dion’s dream-talking to absolutely no fanfare. Phil Milstein, curator of the American Song-Poem Music Archives, spearheaded the re-release that features many more dreams, some hilariously uncensored.

Though McGregor isn't speaking through radio static or narrating in "polyglot", his dreams are as uncomfortable as one might expect if they were confronted with their raw subconscious. Different types of voices appear, as if McGregor was comprised of several people that only came out at night. In fact, in one example entitled "Wha Deboha Yo Ya?" he frantically intones gibberish. It isn't murky or cloudy; it doesn't take practice to listen to, nor is available only between certain frequencies. It's real and not questionable, and it's entertaining and not abstruse. Although it's not from the spirit world, it's as effective and as meaningful, with a wealth of symbols and messages to take from that increase with each listen. In fact, it's been argued many times that all supposed paranormal activity is simply a representation of the subconscious mind of the person who witnesses the event. Dion McGregor may have saved us much time and effort in order to tell us something about the world beyond.

Sources

EVP

Raudive, Konstantin. Breakthrough: An Amazing Experiment in Electric Communication With the Dead. Taplinger Publishing, New York, 1971

Ellis, D.J. "Listening to the ‘Raudive Voices’". Journal of the Society of Psychical Research. 1975 March, Vol. 48, No. 76, p. 31-42

Poysden, Mark. "This is EVP: A Look Behind "The Ghost Orchid" CD". The Anomalist. 1999. http://www.anomalist.com/features/evp.html

The American Association of Electronic Voice Phenomena

http://www.dreamwater.com/aaevp

Parapsychic Acoustic Research Cooperative

http://www.parc.web.fm

VLF Recordings

Stephen McGreevy

http://www.spaceweathersounds.com