Comments on: Paraphonetics 101: a Phonetic Analysis of Electronic Voice Phenomena

By: will

will — Wed, 22 Oct 2008 18:55:45 +0000

Vicki,

No offense towards you or your field was intended. My sole goal was to compare human speech and EVP, something that didn’t seem terribly unreasonable to me at the time. As I stated, this was more of an interest piece, and I felt I was careful not to judge your field in either direction. Apparently, you don’t think I succeeded, and I’m sorry you feel that way.

Either way, I’ll reiterate Vicki’s sentiments: If you’re interested in this phenomenon, look elsewhere as well. This is just the curiosity of a phonetician with little EVP background interested to see what was happening here. According to Ms. Talbott, there’s a great deal of better analysis out there.

Finally, I’ve changed the “Mrs.” to a “Vicki”, per your request. Good luck with your EVP and Linguistic pursuits.

Will

By: Vicki Talbott

Vicki Talbott — Wed, 17 Sep 2008 01:59:54 +0000

I recorded the sample analyzed here. I am a linguist as well as one who records EVP, and I am sorry that I was not consulted before you published your analysis. Watch your typing! The word is ‘evidentiary.’ I suggest you openly publish what you know about, which is not EVP, but human phonetics. As noted before I am a linguist by profession and someone who also contacts those on the other side through EVP. Others must also realize that this was recorded on an old, very well respected recorder for obtaining relevent EVP in total silence, but it is not well recevied as one that records clear EVP.

For those of you who have read this, I suggest you do some serious research before blindly accepting this opinion piece, which is confusingly skewed toward that which the EVP does not relate to, which is human speech. This is a raw file, by the way–nothing was done to clean it. You have chosen an unclear example and as such, potentially sully the work that I and other linguists do in this area. Perhaps a comparison study instead of a quickly concocted write up on a Praat analysis would be preferable. As linguists, we owe this to our readers. Please contact Tom Butler of the AAEVP for a more in depth analysis of the EVP in question. By the way, my name is not MRS. Talbott; it is Vicki Talbott or Ms. Talbott; I have a sociolinguistic problem with being called my mother. As well, as college professors, we do not suggest that our students use Wikepedia in any research cited for papers in any class. Finally, there are two pronunciations for the word; I was aksing which was preferred, not how to pronounce it. VT

By: will

will — Wed, 27 Jun 2007 05:07:25 +0000

Meghan,

The use of Diachronic linguistics to study the actual speech style of the creators of these signals, whatever they may be, would be really fascinating. Imagine if a signal were to be recorded that was pre-vowel-shift English. Very interesting idea, thanks. :)

Will

By: Meghan Armstrong

Meghan Armstrong — Wed, 27 Jun 2007 04:57:41 +0000

This is wonderful! I have been watching the show Ghost Hunters (a personal favorite) and wondering why spetrogram analysis isn’t being used. It’s great to find fellow linguists with an interest in the paranormal… I have always thought that getting some decent EVPs in the right areas would lead to interesting developments in historical linguistics as well, although I doubt we could get everyone on board.
Long live linguistic/paranormal studies!!!

By: will

will — Mon, 23 Apr 2007 07:24:53 +0000

Mr/Ms. Walderberger,

Thanks for your response, and I’m glad to hear that my quick research is palatable even to somebody in your field.

Although I’m not sure I’m ready (or willing) to go out on the hunt for such things with a group such as yours, I’d be happy to look over some of the data that you find to be more convincing and to give my perspective again here. I’m especially curious about your double-recording, and would like to have a look as soon as you release it to the publlic.

The casual work of a Phonetics grad student will likely do little to help (or hurt) your cause, but I’m glad you are at least enjoying my analysis, and I wish you the best of luck in your future studies.

LingMystic

By: M. Waldenberger

M. Waldenberger — Sun, 22 Apr 2007 14:27:54 +0000

I enjoyed your unbiased and open minded posting on Electronic Voice Phenomena. As you have stated, believers will never see anything but the reality in it and the skeptics will never see anything to it at all. I and those in our group see something potentially fascinating and a possible supporting piece of evidence to a theory we are following up on.
Unlike other groups, we were not merely interested in the usual usage of programs like Cool Edit or Audacity to isolate and clean up the potential evp’s. We have been using other pieces of software such as WASP 130 and phonetics software developed at the college of London to extract additional evidence of voice and give us printed data that could be used to show others on the recordings we feel might have value.
We do think that since this kind of communication is believed to be produced by spirits, the lack of the normal mechanics to produce speech may make subtle or severe changes to things like sentence structure, sentence length, pronunciation and parts of normal speech which we can easily and readily identify. The process by which these voices are transmitted to tape and to digital recorders is still unknown but I can tell you from first hand experience, hearing a voice that not only you but others can hear on a recording made in a place where you know you were alone can be disturbing and exciting.
I try to contain my enthusiasm for the potential of this work as do all of our members but it is difficult at times to hold back when you come across something spectacular. Recently, we recorded a voice on two separate recording devices in a room at the same time. While the voice sounds decidedly male and what is being said is agreed to by every party who listens to it, on the other recording, the voice has an almost feminine quality to it as reported by some listeners. This is very exciting indeed because of its rarity.
In conclusion, I do wish that someone such as yourself who really has very little if any interest in this type of research could collaborate with a paranormal group or researcher to do side by side analysis of such recordings and then present findings. Mainstream science will not even broach the subject and those actively researching it never get the acceptance of peers that is usually received with scholarly work. That keeps the answers we seek always just out of reach.