Raudive Voices
Revisited
Techno Talk
Mark Nelson
It’s 13 years since we discussed electronic communication with folk who have departed this life. The
emergence of a new hobby product for conducting your own experiments offers a great excuse for
examining this ‘weird wireless’ topic afresh.
T
he topic of ‘Raudive Voices’
(or Electronic Voice Phenomena
– EVP) is somewhat ethereal and
controversial, often (strongly) associated
with the words ‘debatable’ and ‘allegedly’. Some folk are firm believers, and in
a research project conducted under laboratory conditions and involving more
than 400 people, each of the participants
claimed to hear mysterious voices. The
sincerity of experimenters in this field
is probably not in doubt. On the other
hand, some commentators classify EVP
with the paranormal, life after death and
assorted other-worldly dimensions.
If, like me, you enjoy having your intelligence insulted now and again, and
are willing to waste half an hour listening to total weirdness, then why not give
this mind-bending ‘science’ a hearing?
What’s it all about?
Michael Daniels, whose PsychicScience.
org website is possibly the most accessible introduction to the subject,
explains that EVP effects are now
considered by researchers as one of a
broader range of phenomena known
as ‘Instrumental Transcommunication’
(ITC). Inconsequential experiments to
capture spiritual voices by electronic
means began in 1941, with the first academic discussion being published by
the Journal of the American Society for
Psychical Research in 1959.
The real ‘breakthrough’ came in the
same year when the Swedish painter and
film producer Friedrich Jürgenson was
recording birdsong. When he replayed
the tapes, he heard faint but intelligible
voices in the background, even though
there was no-one else in the vicinity
when the recordings were made. He interpreted what he heard to be his dead
father’s voice, and after making more recordings, he subsequently claimed he’d
heard a message from his late mother.
Following this, Konstantin Raudive,
a Latvian psychologist who had taught
at Uppsala University in Sweden, and
who had worked in conjunction with
Jürgenson, went on to make more than
100,000 recordings which he described
as being communications with deceased
8
people. Some of these recordings were
conducted in a laboratory screened
against electromagnetic signals. They
contained words that Raudive said were
identifiable and the clarity of the voices
heard in his recordings was such that
they could not be readily explained by
normal means. It is in recognition of his
efforts that the name ‘Raudive Voices’ is
now given to this phenomenon.
The Ghost of 29 Megacycles
EVP was discussed in 1970 in the encyclopaedia Man, Myth and Magic, and
during the early-1980s a new British
magazine on the paranormal was issued
with a cover-mounted flexi-disc (remember them?) of EVP recordings. However,
it was not until a few years later that the
subject attracted truly significant attention
when the American investigative writer
and broadcaster John Fuller wrote a book
called The Ghost of 29 Megacycles. This
substantial and seemingly level-headed
paperback introduced the subject of EVP
to the public at large. American investigators were convinced the dead could
communicate with us by radio, setting
up a half-million-dollar project called
Spiricom to establish the proof.
It was pretty obvious that they would
never establish scientific proof, even if
they believed their findings were real.
They argued that if it had been legitimate
for Marconi to investigate the subject in
the 1930s, then why should they not do
so now using more sophisticated equipment. Where credibility broke down
was that for some reason the ‘transmissions’ from the dead were confined to
the 29MHz band, used actively by radio amateurs in the UK and elsewhere.
Even the book’s author was not entirely
convinced, conceding on the first page,
‘This is a strange story. It is either true
or it is not.’ The book is still available at
affordable prices, and you can also read
it online at: https://bit.ly/pw-jan23-29
Don’t try this at home?
I must admit that I don’t feel like disturbing the dead, but if you feel like
having a go, please feel free to visit
https://psychicscience.org/evp, where
you will find chapter and verse on how
these mysterious voices can be recorded and enhanced, as well as listen to
sample recordings and read more on
the subject. The page warns that intense
concentration is required in order to
hear the voices on the tape, which usually has to be replayed several times in
order to decipher the speech. You are
recommended to work in a quiet room,
wear headphones and confine your recording to a few minutes.
If you are feeling flush, you can buy
a ready-made ‘Raudive Diode Receiver
and Microphone for Paranormal Research
Ghost Hunting’. Check out the specification at: https://bit.ly/pe-jan23-ken
This improved version connects to almost any type of digital voice recorder
and now incorporates a switched microphone to allow you to record your voice,
calling out to the spirits, along with the
output from the diode receiver.
Is that all?
Seemingly not. Interest in the subject
has not gone away and apparently many
people around the world are members
of electronic voice societies (see https://
bit.ly/pe-jan23-evp). They remain convinced that they can record the voices
of the dead, receiving messages from the
other side. The growing new wave of such
belief systems is ‘a seemingly irrational
response to an increasingly irrational
world,’ as one commentator puts it.
And finally
Earlier this year, I mentioned a recreation of Ceefax, the BBC’s teletext service
(https://worldofpaul.com). Now there is
Telstar, an emulation of BT’s erstwhile
viewdata service, Prestel. Its creator John
Newcombe says: ‘The aim of the system
is to provide a viewdata experience for
anyone who is interested in how things
‘used to be’. Services in the past typically
provided access via the public switched
telephone network (PSTN) connection,
and this is indeed how Telstar works.
However, Telstar also makes use of a
simple internet connection for modern
internet modems.’ Take a visit to https://
glasstty.com/telstar/ and be impressed.
Practical Electronics | January | 2023
