It’s been a while since I’ve strayed into the Mystic side of Linguistic Mystic. This evening, while Wikipedia-Surfing, I stumbled upon an interesting reported phenomenon: Electronic Voice Phenomena (or EVP). Since I spend a great deal of my free time looking at voices and how speech works, I was interested to see what a bit of phonetic analysis would do to some of the examples that its proponents have given.

Disclaimer

EVP is not a well-studied phenomenon and there is little (if any) scientific evidence in favor of its existence. This post should not be construed as an endorsement of this phenomenon or an assertion of its reality. I try to keep an open mind on such things, but I’m doing this analysis for my own interest (if nothing else, “paraphonetics” is a cool sounding field name), not for any legitimate, scholarly purpose. Take this post (and, if you’d like, the phenomenon itself) with a grain of scientific salt.

What is EVP?

In the words of the American Association of Electronic Voice Phenomena‘s FAQ page on EVP:

Electronic Voice Phenomena (EVP) is the term traditionally used to describe unexpected sounds or voices sometimes found on recording media. EVP initially involved audio tape recorders, but in later years, virtually any recording medium became a vehicle for phenomena. The term Instrumental TransCommunication (ITC) came into being to describe these expanded modes of audio- and video-format communication. Other acronyms used in the literature include Electronic Disturbance Phenomena (EDP) and Trans-Dimensional Communication (TDC).

For a more two-sided (and skeptical) discussion and other resources, I encourage you to visit the Wikipedia page on EVP.

Long story short, EVP are anomalous voices that show up in recordings, often claimed to come from the dead. These voices are reported to be phrases, words, or even dialogues with a living speaker.

Praat and the Paranormal

When I first read about this, I decided to try and find some samples of this phenomenon and run them through Praat, a Phonetic Analysis program. Luckily, the AAEVP provides a number of examples on their site. The one I’ll be analyzing today comes from Vicki Talbott’s Examples, and purports to feature a discussion between her and her son who had recently died, discussing the proper pronunciation of the word “evidentiary”. I encourage you to read her explanation (the last example on her page) and listen to the file a few times before I proceed.

As you can hear, her voice is quite clear (albeit recorded), but the other voice is nearly incomprehensible if you’re not sure what you’re looking for. However, I was curious just how much of the data I’d expect to find in speech would be there, and how much is my brain filling in the blanks. Let’s look a little more closely at the acoustics of the voices.

What’s in a voice?

We hear patterns of sound based on the emphasis and damping of certain parts of the sound spectrum. The vibration of our vocal folds is fairly constant (excepting the occaisional pitch or voicing change), but we’re almost constantly moving our mouths and tongue. Just as your voice changes when you put your mouth to a flexible tube and talk while bending the tube, the sound of your vocal folds vibrating is changed by the position of your tongue, lips, and velum in your mouth and throat. Different vowel sounds are created by modifying the shape of the mouth, which in turn modifies the sound escaping your mouth to be heard by others. This is called the Source-Filter Model of Speech Production.

So, when we hear another person make a sound, say, the vowel ‘i’ (as in feet), we’re analyzing which parts of the sound from their vocal folds are being damped (supressed) and which parts resonate (are stronger). For example, in the vowel /i/, there are strong bands of resonating sound (called ‘formants’) around (roughly) 250hz, 2500hz, and 3000hz. We hear these particular parts of the spectrum being emphasized, and interpret them as somebody making an /i/.

These formants (along with the gaps between them and some other sounds) are what we’re listening for in speech. In clear speech, the formants are well defined and strong, but in distorted or mumbled speech, they’re very tough to pick out, both by computer and with our ears.

Evidentiary evidence

So, for comparison, I’ve recorded a file of myself saying “evidentiary”. Give it a listen, if you’d like.

When I open this file in Praat, it shows me a part of the spectrum (0-5000hz). On that Spectrogram, there are darker parts and lighter parts. The darker parts show the formants (the resonating parts of the spectrum), and the lighter parts show the damped portions. I’ve also had Praat draw red dots on the formants, to make them a bit more distinct. Here’s a screenshot of the spectrogram for my “evidentiary”, labeled with English on top, and IPA on the bottom:

evid1.jpg

As you can see, the heights and separation between the formants (black parts with red dotted lines) are distinctly different for the initial “e” and the “ia” in the middle. If they weren’t, the vowels would just sound the same. Similarly, there are other trademark signs of speech sounds. The ‘sh’ sound (ti in English) shows up with a burst of noise around 3000-7000hz (as one would expect), and the ‘n’ makes everything a bit damped and quieter (as do all nasal sounds). All the formants are well defined, and Praat doesn’t have much trouble finding them and sticking to them.

Now, let’s look at a spectrogram of Talbott’s recording, annotated the same way, with red dot formants, and using her transcriptions from the diagram at the bottom of her site:

evidtalb1.jpg

Of course, the spacing is different, and based on the white streaks around 200hz and 3500hz, it looks like she’s done some filtering to isolate these sounds. The interesting part about this is that there aren’t any well defined formants. Praat is great at finding formants in good files, but it’s also quite adept at finding them in bakcground noise if there’s not any good speech in a given file. As you can see, there are three pretty constant bands of red dots going across the entire spectrogram, with the same amount of variation in the silence as in the “spoken” portions. Although Praat thinks they’re formants, when compared to the relatively sharp black lines in my version, it looks like it’s just finding whatever pattern it can in the noise.

It doesn’t seem like there’s much of anything in the way of clear formants or expected voice patterns. The noise for the ‘sh’ is missing from ‘ti’, the ‘n’ doesn’t seem to affect much, and the formant patterns over the two different /i/’s don’t really match (as they did in mine). Over all, there’s not a lot here to latch on to, and, as you likely noticed when listening to it, it’s by no means obvious what’s being said. Most of the auditory cues we use to pick out meaningful speech are absent acoustically, yet, with a few repetitions, we can usually convince ourselves that we’re hearing speech here.

What does it all mean?

Based on what I see here (in this one example), it seems like many of the fundamental characteristics of human speech are missing in the second, purportedly paranormal voice. I suspect that this is what makes it nearly incomprehensible without coaching.

What does that mean for EVP? Well, nothing, really, because my study here isn’t particularly scientific. Just because a phledgling phonetician doesn’t see speech through one method of analysis doesn’t mean it’s not there. Also, I can’t be sure what sorts of filters were used that might have changed the sound quality. I’m not sure what results a different file would yield.

However, even if this were a perfect analysis, all that I’m proving here is that it’s actually similar to normal human speech. The EVP people will still defend their assertions, and the skeptics will still have their objections to their claims (and methodology, and other such things).

The difficulty with Paraphonetics

The other relevant question is whether such study really matters at all. To the people who believe in EVP, the clarity (or closeness to normal human speech) may not be particularly relevant.

Phonetics is a very exact sort of science, but anything to do with the paranormal is extremely subjective. We can scientifically measure things all day long, but in the end, these sorts of phenomena depend on the interpretation of the listener. Perhaps Vicki Talbott heard “evidentiality” in that noise because of her previous question (using context to make sense of inaudible portions of a “conversation”). Perhaps the noise just coincidentally sounds enough like “evidentiality” to trip the human brain’s speech analysis functions. However, as is the case with all paranormal claims, one can never prove the negative (we can’t prove completely that nothing paranormal occurred in this tape). You’re welcome to believe whatever you’d like on the subject.

Regardless, next time you go out ghost-hunting, you might want to grab a copy of Praat. It can never hurt, and at the very least, Praat can help you find some phantom formants in the background noise. It might not sound scary to you, but in the middle of a research project, they can be downright terrifying.

Tagged with Linguistic Mysticism, Phonetics and Phonology | 12 Comments


Caution: This post contains a good deal more theorizing and unorthodox ideas not accepted by Modern linguistics. As always, corrections on facts are appreciated, but you might not want to cite this as anything other than a young, naive linguistics student ranting.

The Sapir-Whorf hypothesis is a blanket term for the idea that the grammar and lexicon of a person’s language subtly affects their thoughts and perspectives on the world. It’s a very hotly contested issue in modern Linguistics, and although the most extreme variations (the idea that language determines your thought) have been disproved through some pretty ingenious color studies, the more subtle varieties are still supported in some senses.

If the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis is true, a speaker of the Hopi language (which has a very different system of tenses than English) will perceive time in a fundamentally different way than an English speaker. Similarly, a Spanish speaker will have a slightly different view of the world than an English speaker, simply due to the underlying differences between the two languages. If this is, in fact, the case, then there are huge ramifications in Linguistics, Cognitive Science, and the world in general.

However, up until today, nobody has constructed a method to conclusively prove or disprove the idea of the language you speak affecting your thoughts (linguistic relativity).

The LinguisticMystic Method for proving/disproving the Sapir-Whorf Hypothesis, in three easy steps:

  1. Find monolingual native speakers of Hopi and Mandarin Chinese
  2. Find a skilled telepath, ideally one who can speak the same language as the researcher
  3. If the telepath can read (and understand) the minds of the Hopi and Mandarin people, then complete determinism has been disproved. If he/she can read them and understand parts of it, yet notices differences, there might be some relativity going on. If the only difference between the two is the side of the room they’re sitting in, then I’d venture to say that Linguistic relativity is extremely weak or non-existent.

Actually, there’s some false advertising there. Only step one is easy, the others might just be impossible. With the right cash incentive (and a set of plane tickets), you could likely find a native speaker of pretty much any living language without too much trouble, but finding yourself a skilled telepath is far easier said than done. It’s not like you could just post a few flyers on campus (“Skilled telepaths wanted for research study! $$$$”) or check the Yellow Pages, and many people argue that no such people exist. In fact, the relative (or complete) lack of telepaths is the fatal flaw in this experiment’s design, and one of the many reasons that I myself haven’t submitted this to any reputable journals. However, it does underscore something that I’ve come to terms with throughout my study of the idea of linguistic relativity: without an impossible set of circumstances as in my experiment, it might not be possible to prove or disprove the idea, ever.

Why Sapir-Whorf may never be conclusively proved or disproved

Studying language’s effects on thought is a very troublesome area, because there are so many factors to control.

To begin, everybody views the world differently, and uses their language accordingly. For instance, my family is in the photographic printing business, so I’d likely be an extremely biased sample in a color chip study, due to my overdeveloped scrutiny of color. Similarly, there’s likely to be individual cognitive (and linguistic) quirks with every person, so really, there’s no neutral sample of a given language. You might be able to balance it out by performing the study with 150 speakers of a given language, but sadly, there’s nothing to average, much of it will be subjective.

Culture is also a complicating factor. Cultural beliefs and upbringing can have a profound effect on people’s views of the world, and in general, people sharing a given native language (or dialect) are likely to share a cultural background as well. So, you’re placed in the awkward spot of trying to decide whether a given effect is linguistic or cultural (or both). This gets into a “which came first, the chicken or the egg” type of debate that can derail an experiment pretty quickly.

Finally, there’s the issue of the experiment itself. You’re trying to study how people use language, without biasing them. However, you’re going to have to use language to explain the study and conduct the experiments. So, you’ll have to face the added complication of using a translator to pass on instructions, which may bias your participant right from the get-go. Also, keep in mind that, if there is some degree of linguistic relativity, it will likely be universal, and thus, the researcher will be affected by it too. Depending on the nature of these effects, a researcher studying this effect in another person might be like an inmate studying the behavior of fellow inmates. If we’re all looking at the same shadows, who can claim to be objective on their source?

Conclusion

Now, I don’t mean to say that it’s pointless to do research in this area. There are lots of really cool studies going on even now, and every little bit we learn about these effects (or their absence) is a Good Thing™. Although I doubt anybody will ever prove (or disprove) the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis beyond a shadow of a doubt, I’m less and less sure that we need to.

Humans have successfully lived with gravity throughout the history of our species, and only now are we starting to determine what it actually is. Similarly, if it exists, linguistic relativity has always been a force on us, and we’ve made do so far. There’s not really a way to escape it (that I can think of), so finding out more about it is a purely academic exercise. Knowledge is power though, and every little bit of knowledge about how humans function is a good thing.

However, if you do happen to see a Hopi speaker, a Mandarin speaker, and a telepath walk into a bar, keep them there and shoot me an email. I’ll put your name in my dissertation somewhere.

Tagged with Conventional Linguistics, Language and Thought, Linguistic Anthropology, Linguistic Mysticism | 1 Comment


So the other day, I was sitting in the hallway of my University’s Residence Halls, around midnight, and listening to a theology discussion which the RA’s were having. There were people of all different backgrounds there, but the most vocal was a young man of the Mormon faith. At one point, the question arose of Bible translation and the fallibility of human translators.

The young Mormon piped up with a very innovative analogy on translation which he learned in Seminary, which I felt was quite interesting. I’ll roughly paraphrase below:

The word of God is a lot like a picture hanging on a bulletin board. It only has one tack to secure it [representing the Old and New Testament], so anybody can spin it around as they’d like, changing the perspective, even though the picture stays the same. The translators each tilt it a bit differently, and it’s tough to see exactly what the right orientation is.

For us [those of the Mormon Faith], the Book of Mormon is a second tack. It provides a second hold, and keeps you from spinning the picture. Whenever there’s a question about the perspective and translation in one, you can consult the other. What might be unsure with one tack, is securely locked with two.

Whether you believe in the validity of either work, this is an interesting analogy. It seems to imply a distinct split between the actual “word” or message of God, and the written words used to pass it on, much like the split between concept and language used to describe it.

A similar idea is actually used frequently in the translation of a seminal work in Mahayana Buddhism, the Bodhicharyavatara (‘Guide to the Bodhisattva’s Way of Life’) by Shantideva. Very early after its transcription (originally in Sanskrit), two highly authoritative versions were created of the work, one in Tibetan, and one in Sanskrit, and both are treated as equal by the Buddhist community. In modern translations, many of the translators choose to base their work off one version or the other, but use the other version to clarify difficult passages. My personal favorite translation, by Stephen Batchelor, was based on a 12th Century Commentary on the Tibetan text, but uses the Sanskrit for clarification in footnotes. When you’re dealing with differences as extreme as that between “May all women become men” and “May all women attain the rights and privileges of men”, a point of clarification is wonderful.

Now, let’s use a similar idea in a secular sense. I would like to describe an event, something complex, emotional, and generally slightly vague. Take, for example, an account of one’s first day leaving for College. Imagine a bilingual author were to write the story, once in, say, English, and once in Spanish. Not so much translating one into the other, but actually telling the story twice (with an effort to include much of the same information in both). Would the Spanish be a “second tack” for the English version and vice-versa? Could one use the Spanish to clarify the English ambiguities, and vice-versa? Most importantly, would another bilingual reader have a better idea what the author meant by reading both versions, rather than just one?

The more I look at it, translation seems messier and messier. I’ve begun to suspect that there is no such thing as a one-to-one translation, and that any time you switch languages or rephrase, something is lost or gained. This isn’t necessarily bad, but it, like all other things, needs to be studied further.

I hope this post made sense. If not, maybe I’ll try writing the same thing right next to it in Spanish. If it helps, I’ve just found a thesis.

Tagged with Conventional Linguistics, High Precision Language, Language and Ritual, Language Usage, Linguistic Mysticism, Translation and Translation Theory | 2 Comments

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