bobnotes Spirit Spiritual My Spirit Adventures Baseline What a Whisper Sounds Like

Since the experiences I describe in the Who Came Calling? pages, I have quite often made recordings in hopes of finding more EVP, and I have had some good success, but so far no voices of the stout and unassailably real nature that we can hear in, for instance, the excellent overview documentary, Calling Earth by Daniel Drasin. Nevertheless, since I know it’s only me doing these experiments, and since several of my friends can also hear some of the loud whispers the way I hear them, I am firmly persuaded that my EVP are real.

This is my effort to get some of my own materials organized for interested people to check out. I am going to (try to) avoid pointing to the many, many very quiet and hard to make out but still real-seeming whispers that I can hear (and most others cannot!) between, before or after the more unequivocal and understandable whispers. I want to highlight those notable ones and skip the others. I want to be as persuasive as I can be with my own materials. So here goes.

I am going to go slowly in hopes of anticipating skeptical questions and to explain some features of the recordings that most of my readers will not be familiar with. Please feel free to skip over or speed read through this stuff. When the material generates questions in your mind, though, you may find answers here in the opening parts.

So let’s do like the big boys do and first establish a base line. I made a recording on Tuesday, May 23, 2017 – indeed this morning as I write – to demonstrate how whispers sound in an ordinary and expected way, and also to give us an audio file that ought to be free of EVP since I was not meditating beforehand or asking the LBL (life between lives) world in any way to join me. I made this recording just as I have made almost all of my EVP efforts, in my living room. It was mid-morning. My current, white audio recorder sat on a pillow on one side of the sofa where I sat in the middle with a cell phone on my right. I would be facing the camera if I were in this picture of the set up:

This is my usual meditation spot, facing my late wife Doris’s masterpiece above a gas fireplace:

From here that/this morning I recorded a 1m50s audio that began after I laid the white audio recorder down on the pillow. You can listen to it a first time by using the player on the right. >>>>> As you listen to it, you can study its spectrogram —

I will be showing enlarged portions of this spectrogram in a moment, but for now I would remind my readers that they can enlarge their view of this webpage easily to see more detail.

Why use a spectrogram rather that the more commonly seen waveform? Here is the waveform view of the same recording:

Obviously, we get much more information in the spectrogram, and, specifically, we see sound activity present that doesn’t show up at all (for practical purposes) on the waveform. For instance, my three whispers show at about 41, 49, and 58 seconds —

The height above baseline corresponds to the frequency spread of the sound, ranging from 0 to 8 kHz. Intensity ranges from (strong) dark red to lighter, then purple and blue. The white areas indicate the most intensity or volume. The lower band is the right stereo microphone and is closer to where I sit by about an inch and a half. Thus the first whisper is clearly a little more intense in the lower band than it is in the upper band.

I show and demonstrate these whispers because most of the EVP I record is whispers. Some are quite loud and some are as soft as the one on the right above. I mean to restrict myself to the more obvious whispers in this presentation. Anyway, it is naturally a bit tricky to figure out just what is being whispered. It’s easy when, as above, you know in advance. Regardless of that difficulty, when it comes to the audio EVP I will show/play for you here, consider that even though the whispers may be ambiguous as to actual verbal content, THERE SHOULD BE NOTHING THERE AT ALL. And finally, the whispers we will be listening to will show up as strongly on the spectrogram as the one on the left or in most cases more strong, more obvious.

As for listening to these audio clips, on what and how you play them is very important. For instance, the human ear is more sensitive to soft than to loud sounds. Merely cranking up the volume may make it harder to understand what’s there. Just as important is the fact that our ears adjust to a louder volume by turning down their sensitivity to low sounds. Since in practice most of the pretty obvious whispers I get in my EVP follow immediately upon the much louder sound of my own voice in my meditations, this fact usually makes it easy to miss them altogether. The solution is to find a way to start your listening right AFTER my voice. It also helps to stop listening before the louder sound of my next musing comes in.

Certainly the treble/base settings can make a difference (I generally leave them at the same level) but the speakers or earphones/earbuds you use will make a greater one; indeed, they will likely make all the difference. To test your speakers, headphones or earbuds, you can listen for the two car doors to close and the car engine to start up during the quiet period after the whispering —

The three markers show the points where those three events can be heard (barely on my equipment), at 4s, 9s, and 13s approximately. >>>>>It was not easy for me to hear these sounds on the audio recording even though they had been quite obvious to my ears as I sat there – as revealed by my comments at 1m23s. Notice the selection of just this portion of the whisper demo available in the audio player to the right.

OK, now for the real deal !

I begin with what seems to me to be as plain and unequivocal as any whisper I have ever heard. (But as we will see, that unequivocality is an impossible dream.) I made this recording on the morning of June 3, 2017 as I sat in a chair with my shirt off in sun in the patio of my house. I was sunning my eyes as well as my chest, hoping for good benefits from body-produced vitamin D as well as from whatever happens when you close your eyes and let strong light bathe them. At least it is relaxing and warm and pleasant. I had been sitting there for maybe ten minutes, when the cheerful sound of birdsongs made me think of turning on the voice recorder on my smart phone. Since I am by now much experienced in hearing spirit voices on the recordings I make, I can’t say that I absolutely did not expect any. They do keep surprising me. But I was intensely involved with editing half a dozen recent ones and for sure not looking for yet more. It was the spectrographs of the bird songs I thought would be interesting. And they were, and I got a lot of them in the nearly 12 minutes of backyard sounds I ended up with. For instance, this set of three Spotted Towhee calls:

In jumping quickly through this recording, however, I encountered a surprisingly loud whisper quite out of the blue. It comes at about 8m57 seconds and looks like this:

The other marks here are bird calls, mostly quiet over the passing car’s noise you can see from about 8.52 to 8.58. That heavy mark at about 8.57 is the whisper. You can see that it is even a little louder and more extensive than the loudest whisper in my control tape earlier. Here is a close up with green lines marking the start and finish of the whisper, which draws out its second syllable more than the first.

When I asked two friends if they both heard the word I did in this whisper, I was surprised to find that they did not AND the words they heard (different from each other) were accented on the first, not the second syllable. I could not see how it was remotely possible for them to get the syllable stress “wrong.” However, the one friend wears a hearing aid and explained to me that the difference between his hearing and my own might be due to his loss of hearing at the higher frequencies. So I used my Audacity softwear to boost the frequencies above 1kH by quite a bit, and he suddenly heard the second syllable as stressed. In the case of my other friend, who does not wear a hearing aid, but is coming on to 65, that might or might not be the case. We know that the higher frequencies go first. But he began hearing the second syllable as stressed and the word as what I heard after I isolated the second syllable from the first. This makes me think that the frequency range and sound intensity of the first syllable may have distorted how he heard the second one. In any case, I’m just giving fair warning here. If you do not hear a word accented on the second syllable, that may not be due to your audio equipment, but to your own hearing peculiarities.

I am placing a recording of the same section of my backyard recording as you can see in the spectrogram in the image just above, in the right margin >>>>> I hope you hear the same whispered word I did, but my experience is that it takes some getting used to with these whispers. If you hear the first syllable as more stressed than the second one, you may be able to adjust the higher frequencies to be louder by using your computer’s sound system. And you might ask some younger friends to listen. I’ll tell you what I heard at the bottom of this page. You can get there by clicking this link. Use your back button or arrow to return here.

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I have removed the recordings I placed at the point earlier because I find them too personal for use in this public place, inappropriate. Too bad in a way because they dramatically illustrate one very evidential part of this EVP investigation in general — and that is that even though the fact that these ghost whispers are very indistinct makes them subject to quite different readings or interpretations by people, even by the same person over a little time, they remain persuasive because of the simple fact of there being anything so loudly whisper-like there in the recording at all !!

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Notes: I easily heard the word “divine” on my first listen and on all subsequent listenings until I came back to it some hours later and, for a short while, heard “Goodbye.” Both words stress the last syllable and both have a long I sound in it. Now I am back to “divine,” but if I let myself, I can also hear it as “Goodbye.” I think these different readings by the same person ore not due to any indistinctness of the whisper so much as to the absence of verbal or other context.

EVP = Electronic Voice Phenomena.

ITC = Instrumental Transcommunication.

An excellent overview documentary, Calling Earth by Daniel Drasin is available at no cost on Vimeo.