About 9 months after Doris’s death — on April 22, 2016, about five weeks before the Memorial Day call – having been doing a little research into topics like EVP, I decided to give it a try myself. I made a simple 2-minute recording, as is often suggested, in my office at home. I remember being disappointed by it when I played it back because the only unusual thing I heard was a surprisingly loud sound and some clicks I wondered about because there had been no such sound during the recording. I thought maybe the one loud sound was significant, but put the recording aside when a friend listened and said it was just an ordinary technical glitch of some sort. Ten months later, having acquired and used on other recordings some superior audio applications, I decided to give it another hearing. You can use the audio player in the right margin to listen to it yourself. The technical glitch suddenly turned into the word “Yes!” at about 29 seconds.
Listening to this audio now, I realize that it contains many anomalies I did not pay attention to at the time. For instance, the many clicking-clacking sounds. But I made the recording sitting quietly in my office where the only sounds would be of me moving in my chair or picking up and putting down this or that on my desk (none of which I did) plus the occasional car going by.
Here is a decibel waveform of the recording:
The decibel format in waveforms gives us a representation of about how loud the sounds are to the human ear. The marker near 30 seconds indicates where I eventually decided I was hearing the word “Yes!” The aquarium-fish shapes at about 1 minute 30 seconds sound like an automobile going past outside. The larger markings following that appear to show a muffling of the microphones on the recorder as I pick it up to turn it off. You can hear me sigh right after that. At the end we get the sounds of my turning off the device. But apart from my introductory questions to Doris – “Hello, Mama, are you there?” And “Are you there?” as well as the muffling microphone sounds as I put the recorder down or pick it up – there should be no sounds on this recording at all except for the occasional car going past. There is nothing in the room to make clicks like what we hear. The closest I can come to making a click like that is to use my stapler, but that is still not the same sound at all, and it is impossible to use it that quickly. Furthermore, I did not, of course, use my stapler as I sat quietly meditating, hoping to hear from my recently deceased wife. Oh, and also, I did not hear any sounds in this time except for a car going quietly by outside.
At the time, however, I didn’t think of this – I don’t know why – likely because I just wasn’t ready to accept that such things as EVP were possible. Today, however, having spent the intervening time investigating EVP and other paranormal phenomena quite a bit, I am ready to look more closely at this recording. So let’s begin with those large blobs occurring between 10 and 15 seconds. In the waveform above I notice that this sound is much louder on the lower or right channel than on the upper. This asymmetry repeats at a few other places in the recording. And it doesn’t make much sense.
Much to my surprise I heard a whisper in this portion of the audio when I played it recently. I had not heard it before, and I suppose that is just because I did not expect anything and did not pay close attention. In the EVP literature we read that early experiences in recording spirit are generally of whispers. This whisper would probably be in what is called class C, meaning recorded language that will often be understood in different ways by different people. Still people will recognize that they are hearing a voice. I have understood this part of the audio in 2 or 3 different ways myself. (But only as to the ending.) At the moment of writing I understand it to say, “I am here in the arc of the room.” That makes sense in the context of my asking Doris if she were there. This is a pretty strong answer to that question.
Using an audio manipulation program called Audacity (open source and freely available) it is possible to enhance this snippet of audio in many ways. Below here I am pasting a screenshot from the Audacity program of the same 5 seconds or so of audio expanded to more easily distinguish its components by converting the waveform to spectrogram so that we see the intensities of the sound located according to their frequencies, low frequencies at the bottom and the higher frequencies higher up. Visualizing the sound in this way does not change the sound in any way. In this spectrogram red indicates a more intense sound and blue a sound less intense. I am able to associate the words “I am here in the arc of the room” with the several clumps of blue and red, but there is no question they will associate with other phrases as well. Too bad. Still what are such pretty clear voice prints doing there at all?
Since the more intense frequencies in red, especially in the lower or right channel, are mostly noise, we can apply noise reduction and see if that improves the clarity of the voice.
The next spectrogram gives us a passing car outside whose sound slowly increases both in frequency and intensity until right at the end we hear or I should say, I hear the shouted word “Yes!” This is the part of the recording that first attracted my attention. The Yes is quite sharply articulated and rather loud in the context, a fact made all the more strange to me because during the recording, my office and I were entirely silent. Of course the Yes definitely also answers my question, “Are you there?” While this seems very clear to me, many of my friends do not agree that this is the word “Yes.” That’s why this is a class C EVP.
But the presence of strange (and loud, bunched) clicks is perhaps even more puzzling than the presence of voices. At least if one has read about EVP, one can expect whispered voices and even much stronger and clearer voices. But clicks like these are new to me. Although it may be that voices are hidden in them in some way, I think myself it is more likely that the sounds derived from some spirit-world or other-realm process. The Scole group heard strange click-cracking sounds on pretty much every day they met with their spirit team. And they and the spirit team spoke very frequently of special but unspecified processes and procedures that the spirit team were trying out in their efforts to communicate more unequivocally with the Scole group. We are not dealing with agents who have miraculous powers without limit when we deal with spirits.
