Even dumber than EVP
June 17th, 2010
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EVP or “electronic voice phenomena” is what people like to call it when they take a cheap tape recorder or a computer with a sound card and crank the volume way up until they start to hear a lot of noise. This noise is a combination of internally generated noise, RF interference, cross talk from various sources and other various random sounds. However, if you listen closely, the human brain can do an amazing job of convincing itself that it hears a voice in the noise. This is even easier if you know what you’re expected to hear.
Apparently this is not lame enough for some, who find that the sounds just don’t sound enough like ghost voices no matter how high they crank the volume or how cheap their microphones are. Thus a new device has recently been making the rounds in the “paranormal research” community. It’s called the “Frank’s Box” and it promises to revolutionize EVP’s by making them even more dramatic and easy to hear.
Wowa, that sounds like there are definitely some human voices there, right? Well, actually, yes. That’s because a Franks Box is indeed picking up human voices, just not the ones of the dead. More likely, it’s picking up the voices of someone giving a traffic report or complaining about politics, because a Franks Box is actually the equivalent of randomly turning the knobs on an AM Radio:
From “Ghost tech:”
After receiving various messages from computer savvy spirits relaying messages for other spirits who were not so technologically advanced, Frank came up with the idea to create a device that hopefully all spirits could use. His design was apparent to him almost immediately, but the actual construction of the device has led him to create at least 25 different models to date. Each box is unique in design and construction, but is based on the same principle.
Franks spirit receiver starts off with a standard white noise generator which is fed through a random voltage circuit of Franks own design. The random voltage is linked to an AM radio receiver which reacts to the voltage by tuning to a specific spot on the radio dial. This is known as voltage tuning and is a common function of late 80s and early 90s radio receivers. Though various radio stations are turned in for a split second every so often along with regular static, the devices also allows the spirits to interact with the device and create their own vocals through the receiver and for lack of a better term, talk through the device.
A newer version of the box simply tunes back and fourth through the AM band which Frank is calling the Sweep method. At first, he believed that the random voltage design is what allowed it to work but after using the sweep method, he has since changed his mind as it seems to do a better job.
Alright, I realize most self-proclaimed paranormal investigators don’t know the first thing about science or technology, but honestly! If you want human voices it seems like a broadcast band would be the place to find them, but could anyone really believe that randomly tuning from one radio station to another is going to get you anything other than bits and pieces of speech that is not paranormal at all?
If you tune fast enough, what would sound like “Iowa police arrested two suspected…. American consumer confidence was up…. A minor accident on I-95 has …. deadly riots for a second day in… personal debt continues to rise” will become “I’am’A'dead’person” Is this not obvious?
Just when things seemed like they could not get any lamer…
This entry was posted on Thursday, June 17th, 2010 at 10:07 pm and is filed under Bad Science, Just LAME, Not Even Wrong, Paranormal, media. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.
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June 17th, 2010 at 10:47 pm
Funny. This is what modern high grade electronics gets you. In the old days of vacuum tubes, open-air tuning variable capacitors, and hand-wired radios, cross-talk was a common occurrence. No one thought anything about it except how to suppress it got out of hand.
Now I hear tails of kids freaking out at night when their turned-off computer, begins to mumble at them in a low voice at night, because the speakers were left on and some radio station was being picked up by them.
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June 17th, 2010 at 11:46 pm
You’re kidding me right? Wow. Yea, it is dumber than recording normal crosstalk and calling it ghosts
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June 17th, 2010 at 11:52 pm
You think that’s crazy?
Watch this: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=h7zmQjl2bEc&fmt=18
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June 18th, 2010 at 2:30 am
Leaving the obvious quakery part alone, unless you get a long and clearly reapeating pattern, there is no theorical way of telling an a-priori unknown deliberate sequence from a random one.
The saying is worng in the orders of magnitude, but monkeys could actually type apparently meaningfull sentenses from time to time, and the human brain is well tuned to seek patterns in the first place…
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June 18th, 2010 at 4:10 am
This box is seriously the dumbest thing I’ve seen in a while.
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June 18th, 2010 at 5:06 am
So he reinvented the police scanner, but made it useless.
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June 18th, 2010 at 5:39 am
It’s much like the “misheard lyrics” phenomenon that sweeps the internet. Put some lyrics in text on the screen that vaguely resembles what’s sung, and the brain will hear the lyrics that’s printed. In this case, without the text, the sounds would just be random scrapes and noise.
Examples: http://www.youtube.com/results?search_query=misheard+lyrics&aq=f
My favourite: O Fortuna, http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bpAzvKt_8lk
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June 18th, 2010 at 8:32 am
(Forgive me if either these was featured in the video, but I can’t get youtube here)
I always think of:
‘Scuse me while I kiss this guy. -Jimi
and
There’s a bathroom on the right. -CCR
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June 18th, 2010 at 9:32 am
Or my own creation: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FQMrdw9u9AI
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June 18th, 2010 at 11:11 am
OMG buzz0, that video is the awesomest thing on youtube!!!!
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June 18th, 2010 at 7:45 pm
I would love to find out where these idiots are doing one of these investigations. I could have a lot of fun setting up a big low/medium frequency transmitter nearby and have some real fun with them!
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June 19th, 2010 at 1:43 am
Who cares about the legitimacy of ghosts? Since the Gulf oil spill is going to kill off the ocean and all the dispersant chemicals are going to infect our drinking water, the apocalypse is at hand. We’ll all soon know whether ghosts exist or not.
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June 19th, 2010 at 12:31 pm
Jeremy said:
Jeremy, let me assure you of something. The Gulf oil spill is not the end of the world. It’s an oil spill and I’ll grant you that it might be a pretty bad one, but oil spills and even big ones happen.
It may turn out to severely impact the ecology of the region for some time – years and possibly some local effects even lingering decades, but it will not destroy the oceans of the world. Oil is hydrocarbons. In the ocean, where it is churned by waters and exposed to sunlight, it eventually breaks, decomposes and photo-degrades. It will be diluted eventually and break down. What’s left will oxidize.
It has nothing to do with our drinking water. We don’t drink from the ocean. We drink fresh water, both from underground aquafirs and from surface fresh water. The oil and chemical dispersants won’t get to those. They’re in the ocean. Feshwater is replenished from precepitation, which includes water that evaporated from the oceans, but the hydrocarbons are not going to make it through the precipitation cycle. the heavier ones won’t evaporate at all, and the lighter ones will generally oxidize and photodegrade and will not make it to the drinking water of the world.
During the Gulf War, Sadam’s armies destroyed oil terminals and intentionally dumped oil into the Persian Gulf. The total was about five times what has come from the Deep Water Horizon. It would need to flow from the gulf spill for months more to equal that. The spill was pretty devastating locally and even today there are still some lingering effects, like oil tars burried under a thin layer of sediment. But you know what? it wasn’t the end of the world.
There was a similar spill in the Gulf of Mexico in 1980: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ixtoc_I_oil_spill
Yeah, this is bad, but it is not doomsday!
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June 19th, 2010 at 3:17 pm
drbuzz0 said:
Don’t forget the biological factor. The Gulf contains bacteria that subsist on the oil from natural seepages. While the natural seepage rate is rather high, the Deepwater Horizon spill is introducing an unusually large amount of oil. This will cause a boom in the bacterial population as they take advantage of the new food source. It may represent a dangerously high biological oxygen demand (BOD) resulting in a decrease in dissolved oxygen available for other organisms and possibly a so-called dead zone. Eventually, the oil will be consumed or otherwise broken down, and the system will return to equilibrium. Nature deals with it.
Some people have expressed fear about how a hurricane might bring the oil to land. Here’s a brief fact sheet from NOAA that addresses some issues:
http://gulfseagrant.tamu.edu/oilspill/facts_hurricane.htm
Basically:
-Oil could be pushed inland into sensitive waterways and wetlands by a storm surge.
-A hurricane will not rain oil.
-A hurricane passing to the west of the spill could push the slick toward shore.
-A hurricane passing to the east of the spill could push the slick out to sea.
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June 19th, 2010 at 4:35 pm
Very true. Bacteria will play a roll as well. It may very well cause BOD issues but that’s temporary. There’s no doubt that this spill is going to have some big biological effects in the region for months to years to come.
Actually, a hurricane may help the situation if it can disperse the oil and agitate it enough to hasten breakdown.
I’m still waiting for the well to be capped in some kind of reliable manner before breathing a sigh of relief. We can’t wait all the way to August to October for the relief wells to begin operation. I am hoping efforts to expand the capture will go well. Once the vast majority of the oil is being contained, it will be possible to start to estimate the damage.
Regardless, though, this is not the end of the world.
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June 19th, 2010 at 8:26 pm
drbuzz0 said:
I prefer Michael Bay’s hurricane scenario.
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June 20th, 2010 at 2:48 am
People who are so despirate for a friend they have to make up pretend voices should just get a dog. The dog will be your friend, even if you’re a complete loser. The dog doesn’t care you’re a wacko. Just feed it and pet it and walk it occasionally and it’ll be your friend. No need to pretend there are voices coming out of a box because no living human thinks you’re worth spending time with,.
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June 20th, 2010 at 4:03 am
Let me correct myself before my old Env. Eng. professor sees this. BOD is biochemical oxygen demand, not biological.
Regardless, it’s another example of nature’s tendency to right itself. Despite what doomsayers would like to believe, while locally this is a disaster, globally it’s only a pimple. Our current biosphere does not teeter in a delicate balance ready to be tipped into a fiery inferno. Nature does not sustain houses of cards, it knocks them down. Our biosphere is a base state defined by innumerable biological, geological, and cosmic inputs, including insults much larger than the Deepwater Horizon oil spill.
None of this is to say that we do not make things unpleasant for ourselves by polluting, but a larger-than-normal release of oil will not taint the world’s drinking water, ignite the atmosphere, or cause the sun to implode. What are the game-changers? Changes in solar activity, orbital cycles, evolutionary breakthroughs (photosynthesis, grasses), plate tectonics, super volcanoes, etc. An oil spill just doesn’t compare.
The apocalypse crowd wants to envision every event as the first domino, but they cannot appreciate the mitigating factors. I can’t fully, either, but at least I know it.
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June 22nd, 2010 at 6:09 am
Nice, but you got the lyrics wrong.
Here’s the correct version (in Swedish):
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3ILgnixyCRo
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June 30th, 2010 at 1:27 am
Just because you don’t understand something or because you are not into it does not make it dumb.
Paranormal research has been put on the fringe by the scientific establishment who have refused to take it seriously. It is laughed at because it’s mostly amateurs, but that’s because professionals either refuse to even participate or we’re not allowed to become professionals because the field is oppressed.
Isn’t science supposed to be about openness?
Why not stop laughing at this long enough to consider it in a real experiment to see what it can do. You will be surprised.
I do not know this device btw, but I do know EVP very well and EVP is an amazing way for people without psychic abilities to communicate with the world beyond us. I think some day designing a true ghost radio would be an amazing step in communications, because now it is very spotty. If you think you are so smart, how about helping out and doing something with your talent? Instead of talking bad about the design, why not improve it??
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July 4th, 2010 at 11:05 am
There is nothing to improve on the design. It does not pick up ghosts/spirits. It picks up random fragments of ordinary radio transmissions and lots of static. It’s basically an ordinary radio that’s randomly turning the frequency knob. The only improvement to be made is to remove that random element, turning it into an ordinary radio.
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