What Is EVP? How to Record and Review Voice Phenomena

Where the idea came from

In 1959 the Swedish painter and film producer Friedrich Jürgenson reported hearing voices on tape recordings of birdsong. The Latvian psychologist Konstantīns Raudive took up the idea in the 1960s, recording thousands of fragments and publishing them in a book translated into English as Breakthrough in 1971. Raudive’s work is what made EVP widely known.

Critics noted from the start that many of Raudive’s voices were faint, multilingual and open to interpretation, and that his recordings were made with radios and microphones that pick up stray broadcasts. The same issues apply to EVP recordings today.

Common explanations for EVP

• Background speech: voices from another room, outside or a neighbour, too quiet to notice at the time.
• Radio and electrical interference: cheap recorders and long microphone cables can pick up broadcasts and electrical noise.
• Handling and clothing noise: rustles and bumps that, slowed or filtered, take on a vocal shape.
• Compression artefacts: lossy formats such as MP3 can turn quiet noise into warbling, tonal sounds.
• Auditory pareidolia: the brain’s habit of hearing words in ambiguous sound, especially when primed with a suggestion.

How to record an EVP session

1. Record in short takes of thirty seconds to a few minutes. Short takes are far easier to review than one long recording.
2. Use the best microphone you have and keep the device still on a surface — handling noise is the most common source of false positives.
3. Stay quiet and still while recording. When something happens — you move, a car passes, a floor creaks — say so aloud. Investigators call this “tagging”.
4. Note who is present and where. A voice you cannot place is only interesting if you know it was not one of you.
5. If you ask questions, leave a generous silence after each one, and keep the questions short.
6. Record a minute of the empty room before you begin. That baseline is invaluable when you compare sounds later.

How to review EVP recordings

Review with good headphones in a quiet place. Listen to each take straight through first, at normal speed, before you start slowing or filtering anything — processing can create shapes that were not there.

When a sound catches your attention, mark it and look at it as well as listening. A spectrogram shows whether it has the stacked harmonic bands of a voiced sound, or whether it is broadband noise. The EVP Recorder’s scan marks segments with speech-like features and explains what it measured for each; the Audio Analyzer shows the spectrogram, levels, noise floor and mains hum of any file.

Reverse playback is a long-standing part of EVP review and a useful check: genuine speech sounds clearly unnatural backwards, so a fragment that sounds like a word in both directions deserves extra scepticism.

Finally, test the fragment blind. Play it to people who were not there without suggesting what it says, and ask them to write down what they hear. Agreement between independent listeners is the minimum bar for a sound being more than noise.

Making EVP-style audio

If you want EVP-style sound for a video, game or haunted attraction rather than an investigation, the EVP Generator renders typed lines as a formant voice through static, and the Ghost Voice transforms a recording of your own voice. Both export WAV files.