[KinGensai]

This is where I have a problem: There are no “anomalies”, there’s just a combination of noise and distortion sources. And, as there are no anomalies, then obviously there is no understanding of them. So maybe you are talking about “metaphysical understanding” in the sense of some sort of conception/appreciation of some imaginary thing/creature/phenomena but then of course we’re not talking about actuality and a shallow level of this conception/appreciation doesn’t make sense?

G

We just have a fundamental disagreement about what actuality encompasses. It's effectively a moot point because scientific research will continue either way. You are a hardline skeptic and I can appreciate that. I just don't think the scope of our knowledge is anywhere near complete enough to make conclusions about the nature of unknown unknowns (hence the distinction).

 

[gregorio]

It's effectively a moot point because scientific research will continue either way.

Is there much/any real scientific research in this area? Not sure I’ve seen any. I’ve seen research presented in a somewhat scientific style but which is actually pseudoscience or done so badly it’s effectively pseudoscience. This is not entirely unheard of in the audio world, when there’s a product to sell.

You are a hardline skeptic and I can appreciate that. I just don't think the scope of our knowledge is anywhere near complete enough to make conclusions about the nature of unknown unknowns (hence the distinction).

I’m not entirely sure I am a hardline skeptic, certainly I would seem to be in comparison to many audiophiles who seem particularly eager to believe any old nonsense but generally I don’t dismiss claims out of hand, unless I have a reasonable understanding of the issue and a heavy preponderance of evidence. Admittedly, having spent so long in the audio world as a practicing professional, there are fewer and fewer issues where I don’t have a reasonable understanding, although it does still happen on occasion.

However, I don’t see how that’s relevant in this case because the assertion in your second sentence I’ve quoted above is false anyway! In fact, our knowledge was complete enough over 70 years ago and all the research since has only confirmed that fact. In 1947, Claude Shannon proved that 100% of the audio information could be captured with digital audio. If Shannon were somehow wrong, then the digital age would not exist and even if he were wrong, it still wouldn’t make any difference, because again, if there are somehow some unknown unknowns then we cannot record or reproduce them. The area where there are unknowns, or more precisely, some uncertainty and therefore the potential for “unknown unknowns”, is certain areas within the field of psychoacoustics. Specifically, those areas of psychoacoustics dealing with human perception but of course, here we’re talking about perceptual effects, not actual sound or audio properties!

G

 

[KinGensai]

Is there much/any real scientific research in this area? Not sure I’ve seen any. I’ve seen research presented in a somewhat scientific style but which is actually pseudoscience or done so badly it’s effectively pseudoscience. This is not entirely unheard of in the audio world, when there’s a product to sell.

Parapsychology is not a very well funded scientific endeavor, so a lot of amateurs end up trying and messing things up that a more professional lab wouldn't. The team researching Skinwalker Ranch are the most professional team I know of actively conducting research, and while things get odd there on occasion, not repeatable.

This sort of stuff has traditionally been relegated to religious institutions like the Catholic church, mostly for the purpose of exorcism. While the Vatican libraries are vast with a lot of hush hush information like the non canonized books of Solomon focused on the nature and practices of the occult, it's hardly of any noteworthy scientific value.

I’m not entirely sure I am a hardline skeptic, certainly I would seem to be in comparison to many audiophiles who seem particularly eager to believe any old nonsense but generally I don’t dismiss claims out of hand, unless I have a reasonable understanding of the issue and a heavy preponderance of evidence. Admittedly, having spent so long in the audio world as a practicing professional, there are fewer and fewer issues where I don’t have a reasonable understanding, although it does still happen on occasion.

I said that in the context of the paranormal, which EVPs are one part of. It certainly seems to me like you don't believe there is anything going on outside of coincidental random noise. Perhaps I'm wrong, but so far that's how I have interpreted your statements.

However, I don’t see how that’s relevant in this case because the assertion in your second sentence I’ve quoted above is false anyway! In fact, our knowledge was complete enough over 70 years ago and all the research since has only confirmed that fact. In 1947, Claude Shannon proved that 100% of the audio information could be captured with digital audio. If Shannon were somehow wrong, then the digital age would not exist and even if he were wrong, it still wouldn’t make any difference, because again, if there are somehow some unknown unknowns then we cannot record or reproduce them. The area where there are unknowns, or more precisely, some uncertainty and therefore the potential for “unknown unknowns”, is certain areas within the field of psychoacoustics. Specifically, those areas of psychoacoustics dealing with human perception but of course, here we’re talking about perceptual effects, not actual sound or audio properties!

G

This here is where the main disconnect is. As far as the causal chain of kinetic energy > transfer of energy to sensory organ / recording equipment > conversion of kinetic energy to electromagnetic energy > interpretation of energy by brain / recording of EM signal by ADC, I get is disambiguated. As I said in my opening argument in post #21, I'm mainly concerned with instances of recorded EVP where there was no corroborating evidence of physical noise recorded by other cameras or perceived by any other people present at the time of said recording. The recordings that play back a sound of sufficient amplitude to be easily detectible by other recording equipment and peoples' ears are the most baffling to me because the recordings that play back a very quiet whisper or a barely audible sound with boosted gain are easily debunked as very quiet localized sounds. Some of these recordings are very loud scream like sounds that are louder than the people speaking directly into the recorder, and if they were recordings of physical sound they would have been so obviously audible people would have reacted in some sort of way to them (not to mention they would have been picked up by the mics on cameras). I've heard what atmospheric noise and EMI sounds like, they sometimes can sound vaguely human, so that necessitates the contextual analysis for relevancy and repeated similar occurrences.

I know I disclosed my biases before, but I also have a personal reason why I think there may be more to this than mere coincidence of chance. I had paranormal experiences myself, thankfully not directed at me, but at a friend of mine who actually practiced more mainstream occultic practices. He had odd happenings ongoing at his apartment, which I was a witness to one such occurrence of minor poltergeist activity. This thing would move small objects around the apartment, and I witnessed some small bookends moving without obvious explanation.

The phenomenon itself is not what I'm questioning. I'm curious about why they happen, and that's a question that current scientific field theories are unable to answer.

 

[gregorio]

Some of these recordings are very loud scream like sounds that are louder than the people speaking directly into the recorder, and if they were recordings of physical sound they would have been so obviously audible people would have reacted in some sort of way to them (not to mention they would have been picked up by the mics on cameras). I've heard what atmospheric noise and EMI sounds like, they sometimes can sound vaguely human, so that necessitates the contextual analysis for relevancy and repeated similar occurrences.

The phenomenon itself is not what I'm questioning. I'm curious about why they happen, and that's a question that current scientific field theories are unable to answer.

It’s that last sentence disagree with, because not only are there “current scientific field theories” that are able to answer why those phenomena happen but there are basic engineering reasons why they can and do happen in practice:

“Very loud scream like sounds” occur in practice for a variety of reasons, probably the most obvious and the one you’ve most likely experienced or heard of is “feedback”, which commonly sounds like a howl or scream, depending on the frequencies that are feeding back. In live events (amplified music concerts for example), a feedback loop can occur between the speaker output and the mic input, as the signal is amplified. Of course though, this is audible sound that everyone hears at the time but there can also be feedback in the routing matrix of field recorders/mixers. This is a feedback of audio signals that occurs entirely internally within the mixer/field recorder, it’s not sound feedback between the mic/speakers and therefore it is not audible while filming/recording, it’s only audible when monitoring the recording and sometimes not even then but only later when listening back to the recorded channels/mix. Modern field recorders/mixers are quite complex bits of kit and particularly in reality shows, the setups can be extremely complex, so while you wouldn’t expect a good professional to make this type of routing error, it does happen on occasion. There are other potential causes of this phenomena, for example “break through” is quite common when using radio mics, as are short bursts of static, howls or scream like sounds with a variety of causes, from automatic switching between the “diversity” inputs, to the transmitters/receivers becoming unstable as the batteries near the end of their charge.

”I've heard what atmospheric noise and EMI sounds like” - Well, yes and no. I don’t doubt your claim to have heard it, but having heard it once (or even quite a few times) is very different to extensive experience examining and working with it, because as I mentioned previously, it’s extremely variable, even from moment to moment and even when many/all of the variables (equipment, settings, location and even time) appear entirely constant. I also mentioned the role of Dialogue Editor, who will typically have to listen to/examine many (possibly hundreds) hours of production sound for each episode or film, both the production sound mix/es and the “Iso’s”. Only after a considerable time fulfilling that role is it likely you will encounter most of the potential phenomena and even after many years, there are still some very rare phenomena you probably have not encountered, there is still the odd surprise. “Room Tone” (atmospheric/ambient noise) almost always has to be manipulated because it never matches precisely (even with the same equipment, location and time) and typically doesn’t even match well enough not to be audibly different. In some cases, the match is so poor that we can’t even make it audibly match with manipulation (applying EQ, etc.), so sometimes we have to manufacture Room Tone (ambient noise) from scratch!

I won’t go into all the details of “production sound” but recording sync sound with cameras, especially multiple cameras, is a specialist field, requiring a lot of knowledge/experience and there’s numerous things that can and will go wrong because recording sound isn’t the only priority and commonly isn’t even high on the list of priorities. It’s significantly different from music recording in a recording studio.

G

 

[KinGensai]

@gregorio
Feedback loops I am familiar with, that's a common problem I dealt with performing music. That is distinct from what I'm talking about. Granted that is as a musician, not the acoustic engineer running the equipment, so you could be right about routing errors.

You are right about my experience with audio oddities/errors, it is certainly limited. That's a part of the reason why I don't blindly believe every allegation of captured EVP because it's possibly coincidental.

Related study on this topic leaves much room for doubt, indicating that even Class A1 EVPs are only recognized by 25.2% of people who are interested enough in the topic to even find the ATransC. This study also mentions a phenomenon corroborated by clinical psychology called inattentional agnosia, which is the other reason why I don't blindly believe everything labeled an EVP.

My argument is this. Those explanations you bring up are very reasonable and probably the case for many alleged EVPs people use as "proof". Both the technical side and psychoanalytical side have explanations that are reasonable and highly probable in explaining this stuff. But I find it difficult to believe that all of it is pareidolia given how much circumstantial evidence there is about how much we have yet to uncover in the hard and soft sciences, how the human species creates and perpetuates mythological constructs (namely through the phenomenon of the collective unconscious as theorized by Jung), and how animals demonstrate superior sensory abilities all the time vs humans.

 

[gregorio]

Feedback loops I am familiar with, that's a common problem I dealt with performing music. That is distinct from what I'm talking about.

Typically, a feedback loop in music situations is due to a resonance at a particular frequency and can therefore be dealt with by a high Q notch filter. Sometimes though it’s several resonances, which can require several notch filters (or another solution) and this type of feedback loop can sound uncannily like a scream, especially when it causes still more tones/freqs due to clipping distortion and IMD, as the amp, speakers, tape or digital recorder approach their limits/saturation.

You are right about my experience with audio oddities/errors, it is certainly limited. That's a part of the reason why I don't blindly believe every allegation of captured EVP because it's possibly coincidental.

I’ve come across some real oddities over the course of nearly 30 years working in film/TV sound. Someone apparently whistling Yankee Doodle Dandy over a take, and someone saying “are you riding a donkey?” over another take, which couldn’t have been coincidence because it occurred twice, on different days. No one had said or whistled that, no one heard it at the time, it only occurred on a certain channel (or channels) but was completely non-existent on others and pretty much everyone who heard it on the recording later recognised it, without being told before hand what to listen for. It wasn’t pareidolia, the freqs were identifiable in a spectrogram and these are just two of numerous examples I’ve experienced over the years, both of which were explained, though only after a considerable time in the latter example.

But I find it difficult to believe that all of it is pareidolia given how much circumstantial evidence there is about how much we have yet to uncover in the hard and soft sciences …

Two points: Firstly, it’s not all pareidolia, the two examples above weren’t and there are numerous other examples that weren’t, although there are also other numerous examples where that is the explanation, for example the old reversing of various recordings and hearing messages about the devil was a popularly famous example a few decades ago. In addition to pareidolia (and the two examples above, which were not a quirk of human perception), there are numerous other ways that human perception can be fooled, some of which have again been routine procedure for Dialogue (and other film sound) Editors for many decades, some of the tricks we can play with phonemes and other sounds for example.

Secondly, I’m not sure exactly what you mean by “hard and soft sciences” but it’s a quite common trope for audiophiles to claim that science doesn’t know everything and/or that it’s constantly evolving. This is true of course but only in certain areas. At the cutting edge of mathematics and physics we don’t know everything, science in these areas is constantly evolving and there is still more to uncover but what many audiophiles don’t seem to understand (largely because they simply don’t know and have been misinformed) is that we’re not dealing with the cutting edge of physics or mathematics, we’re dealing with good old classical physics, effectively put to bed ~130 years ago and maths from mostly ~200 years ago, although one could argue that Shannon’s maths ~75 years ago was at least somewhat innovative. There really is nothing ”we have yet to uncover” but again, even if there were, then we cannot record or reproduce it anyway. Audiophiles often like to see themselves as ”special”, an especially discerning community, specifically concerned with a far higher class of consumer equipment than the average consumer. In reality, they are just a very tiny group within the telecoms industry, which has had, arguably, more R&D resources thrown at it (both in terms of money and scientists/researchers/engineers) than any other industry and, for well over a century. So the chances of coming across some completely new, previously undetected, un-hinted at audio/sound phenomena is minuscule, at most! The exception to all the above is the field of psychoacoustics, where we definitely don’t know everything, it is still evolving and there almost certainly is still more to uncover but that ALL pertains to how our brain interprets/perceives/evaluates/responds to sound, not to the sound itself!

G

 

[KinGensai]

Humanities types refer to our fields as "soft science" because it's rather difficult to quantify much of what we study, so there's a lot of ground to cover. "Hard science" would be things like physics & mathematics given how much easier it is to quantify and measure facts in hard numbers.

I'm particularly interested in the implications of quantum entanglement theory on our classical understanding of cognitive psychology and psychoanalysis, given how difficult it was to understand how a collective unconscious could theoretically exist without such an idea. It just makes sense to me that, if this is where were are at deciphering our own weird ass wetware, how much more lurks in metaphysics that we couldn't even begin to conceive of now.

 

[bigshot]

The team researching Skinwalker Ranch are the most professional team I know of actively conducting research

If that is the group in the Netflix documentary I watched, that doesn't say much for the quality of research in this area.

 

[KinGensai]

If that is the group in the Netflix documentary I watched, that doesn't say much for the quality of research in this area.

Haven't seen you in a while, welcome back.

I did say it's the most professional team I know of, parapsychology is maligned as a novelty pseudoscience so most scientists gravitate away from it, and funding is spotty at best. Most people I see doing anything remotely evidence based are... untrained in scientific inquiry, so they skip the important bit about defining operational parameters and organizing a unified hypothetical field theory. Assigning causation to mythological constructs like ghosts, angels/demons, spirits, aliens, or whatever else is a classic mistake, that's setting the stage for confirmation bias and leaving more fundamental questions of metaphysical causation unanswered.

 

[FunkyBassMan]

Some of the greatest minds in human history...

Socrates: "I know that I am intelligent, because I know that I know nothing."

Einstein: “The more I learn, the more I realize how much I don't know."

Francis Bacon: “The greatest obstacle ... is the illusion of knowledge."

Bertrand Russell: "The trouble with the world is that the stupid are cocksure and the intelligent are full of doubt."

...as opposed to ...

gregorio: “science doesn’t know everything and/or that it’s constantly evolving... is true... only in certain areas... There.. is nothing ”we have yet to uncover” "

Jefferson, paraphrased, may have expressed the idea best: he who claims to know everything knows less than nothing.

 

[bigshot]

Most people I see doing anything remotely evidence based are... untrained in scientific inquiry, so they skip the important bit about defining operational parameters and organizing a unified hypothetical field theory. Assigning causation to mythological constructs like ghosts, angels/demons, spirits, aliens, or whatever else is a classic mistake, that's setting the stage for confirmation bias and leaving more fundamental questions of metaphysical causation unanswered.

In the series I watched they made crap up, pulled out a wacky machine with blinking lights and VU meters to measure it, then they were amazed that none of their measurements added up to anything and chalked it up to aliens trying to confuse them. Perhaps that's the same thing you said; but with all those fancy words, it's hard tell.

FBM, my favorite quote on that subject is "Ignorance is bliss." There's also a good one by Mark Twain in my sig file.

 

[KinGensai]

In the series I watched they made crap up, pulled out a wacky machine with blinking lights and VU meters to measure it, then they were amazed that none of their measurements added up to anything and chalked it up to aliens trying to confuse them. Perhaps that's the same thing you said; but with all those fancy words, it's hard tell.

FBM, my favorite quote on that subject is "Ignorance is bliss." There's also a good one by Mark Twain in my sig file.

I'm not sure what machine they are using that has blinking lights, I'm familiar with EMF detectors that go off when they detect an EM spike in their near vicinity.

I'm just trying to say that they are going in to an investigation already sure of what causes certain things, which leads to biased interpretation of anything that is caught to fit a preconceived narrative. It's a problem applicable to EVPs too, priming happens all the time and results in increased instances of paredolia.

 

[Ryokan]

and how animals demonstrate superior sensory abilities all the time vs humans.

Animals have a heightened awareness - they can discern small changes in the air and hear soft out of place sounds. We've probably lost much of this ability (and don't heed it if we do) over time as we aren't under constant threat.

 

[gregorio]

Some of the greatest minds in human history...
Socrates: "I know that I am intelligent, because I know that I know nothing."
Einstein: “The more I learn, the more I realize how much I don't know."
Francis Bacon: “The greatest obstacle ... is the illusion of knowledge."
Bertrand Russell: "The trouble with the world is that the stupid are cocksure and the intelligent are full of doubt."
...as opposed to ...
gregorio: “science doesn’t know everything and/or that it’s constantly evolving... is true... only in certain areas... There.. is nothing ”we have yet to uncover” "

You missed one:
FunkyBassMan: I’m going to respond to those who have refuted my BS by proving I don’t understand even simple quotes “of the greatest minds in history”, lie about what those who refuted my BS actually stated and defend my BS with nothing but ad hominem attacks in a science discussion forum. - Way to go, lol!!

G

 

[bigshot]

I'm just trying to say that they are going in to an investigation already sure of what causes certain things, which leads to biased interpretation of anything that is caught to fit a preconceived narrative. It's a problem applicable to EVPs too, priming happens all the time and results in increased instances of paredolia.

What I was trying to say was that those guys at the Skinwalker Ranch didn't look like they were conducting an investigation. They looked like they were trumping up a bunch of hooey to make entertaining television. But they didn't even succeed at that because the series never added up to anything at the end. But the blinking lights, breathless commentary and hyper emotional staff meetings made it seem like maybe it did.