EVP

Electronic Voice Phenomenon. Voices, words, or fragments of speech recovered from audio recordings that were, at the time of recording, made in apparent silence. The category was named by the Latvian writer Konstantīns Raudive in nineteen-seventy-one, on the basis of work begun a decade earlier by Friedrich Jürgenson. The methodology has not changed substantially since. A recorder is left running in a room or location; the recording is afterward played back at slow speed and heard with care. The voices, when they appear, are short. They speak in the language of the listener. The literature is extensive and contested.

The phenomenon sits at the meeting point of folkloric belief, mid-century radio engineering, and the human ear’s well-documented tendency to find speech in noise. The archive records the practice without arbitrating the cause. Companion app Spirit Box implements the modern field-recording form.