It’s my contention that mics only pick up/introduce what I mentioned. I have no idea what causes the perception of EVP and ITC, although pareidolia seems highly probable.
G
This is probably getting a bit off topic, but I'm intrigued now, hopefully this tangent won't go long.
For the vast majority of cases involving EVP from it's introduction as a concept with Edison[1] and early recorded instances of EVP[2] (Szalay & Bayless for example), I agree that it's pretty much all attributable to pareidolia and apophenia with a big side of expectation bias from priming[3]. This isn't a phenomenon exclusive to parapsychology, it happens in clinical psychology and all the different subtypes of adversarial psychology as well. I'm absolutely positive we agree on this one since we both accept DBTs/ABX as a sound standard for scientific testing.
However, that applies to the instance of EVPs as defined by Konstantin Raudive in his book on the topic. Since that time, multiple different classes of EVP have been recorded and classified, with the most convincing being in tandem with video recordings to help debunk other possible mundane causes of the sound. These all have their problems of course, namely that the conditions are not as strictly controlled as would be ideal (Skinwalker ranch comes closest to that maybe?) and the conditions being currently unrepeatable due to our inability to causally link the stimuli to the result.
Of these newer classes of EVP, I'm mostly in the camp of expectation bias combined with pareidolia until the noise created is clearly captured by a piece of recording hardware (as in clearly above the noise floor and intelligible) and is not heard by anyone at the time (which would be evidenced by a lack of reaction to that sound). This would encompass the unintentional capture of electronic only EVP or the intentional attempt to capture EVP via spirit recording (record using a digital recorder, say something, stay silent for a period). The other types of EVP capture are too dubious to count as anything besides circumstantial evidence IMO.
So the question I have is this: If there is no physical sound for people to detect in the moment, and if even other mics/ADCs didn't capture it, what is that phenomenon being recorded?
[1]:
Clark, Ronald W. (1977). Edison - The Man Who Made the Future
. G. P. Putnam’s Sons.
[2]:
Senkowski, Ernst (1995). "Analysis of Anomalous Audio and Video Recordings, presented before the "Society For Scientific Exploration" US – June 1995"
[3]: "Effects of Priming on the Detection of Paranormal Phenomena: Evidence from an Online Psi Task",
Chris A. Roe, Caroline Watt, & Kirsten Hodgson, Journal of Parapsychology, 2015, 79, 209-217. DOI: 10.30891/jopar.2015.01.04