Comments on: Voices amid the static

By: anon

anon — Tue, 30 Nov 2010 04:41:02 +0000

Would you please post the source for this when you find it? Have you written to Jon Calver, the producer of “speak spirit speak”? http://www.york.ac.uk/ipup/staff-biogs/calver.html

By: I Heard Voices – But No One Was There | Do You Believe in Intuition?

I Heard Voices – But No One Was There | Do You Believe in Intuition? — Sat, 20 Nov 2010 03:54:07 +0000

[...] Voices amid the static (mindhacks.com) [...]

By: Barrie Sutcliffe

Barrie Sutcliffe — Thu, 18 Nov 2010 21:48:23 +0000

I have recently finished a book called “The Audible Past” by Jonathan Sterne. There is a large chapter in there about the origins of sound fidelity, and part of the conversation goes into this aspect of radio listening. Radio listening was and still is very very noisy, and people were often in the early days mocked for putting up with the hiss and static, as it was common to think you’ve heard something but haven’t. The book had a few cartoons from the funny papers about this too.
I work with radios a lot in my art practice and rely on this effect too. The Skinner experiment sounds interesting!

By: DRK

DRK — Thu, 18 Nov 2010 04:28:43 +0000

I suspect that the perception of voices among the static in the early days of radio was an artifact very similar to the human predilection to see faces everywhere; we are hard wired to impose sense on random sensory inputs.

By: Weston DeWalt

Weston DeWalt — Wed, 17 Nov 2010 17:06:39 +0000

You say that “‘Speak Spirit Speak’ started with a story about Swedish radio operatives during World War II who diligently tracked Nazi radio transmissions – only to discover afterwards that the area they were monitoring never contained any enemy forces.” – I’ve not heard this story before, but, when pondering its implications, one needs to consider the known physics of “radio propagation,” which has established that radio waves don’t just travel in a straight line. Indeed, they can arc over the horizon. So the WWII listeners, while monitoring a specific area, could easily have picked up signals from just about anywhere.

By: Simon Dymond

Simon Dymond — Wed, 17 Nov 2010 16:20:26 +0000

Sorry, the correct reference is Skinner (1936):

Skinner B. F. The verbal summator and a method for the study of latent speech. Journal of General Psychology. 1936b;2:71–107.

By: Simon Dymond

Simon Dymond — Wed, 17 Nov 2010 16:18:32 +0000

In 1939, B.F. Skinner developed the verbal summator to experimentally induce the effect you describe.

To quote: The verbal summator is a device for repeating arbitrary samples of speech obtained by permuting and combining certain speech sounds. One of its uses is comparable with that of the ink-blot and free-association tests. The speech sample does not fully represent any conventional pattern in the behavior of the subject but it functions as a sort of ink blot. (Skinner, 1939,p. 71).
Not sure if there has been much use of the technique since then, but I would imagine it being useful in experimental psychopathology research on hallucination-proneness and relations with various task performance paramaters.

By: Armands

Armands — Wed, 17 Nov 2010 10:25:04 +0000

Konstantīns Raudive has done some work on EVP http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Konstantin_Raudive

By: ikinengland

ikinengland — Tue, 16 Nov 2010 22:08:43 +0000

This has been around for years. I remember hearing a radio programme about this on BBC Radio 2 about 40 years ago. Seem to recall they included getting recordings of voices from inanaminate objects like paintings (possibly Mona Lisa).

By: David Malone

David Malone — Tue, 16 Nov 2010 20:51:15 +0000

I’ve recently taken up ham radio and find this happening to me. Occasionally when trying to hear faint signals (I’ve heard this with time signals, not just voices) then find myself thinking that I hear it and then realise it isn’t really there.