New Ways of Analyzing Information
New audio software that scans EVPs for human voices and sophisticated meters, gauges, cameras, and recorders are all relatively cutting edge methods to help paranormal investigators analyze information. The new technologies continue to improve and expand our knowledge as we welcome a future in which much of the drudgery may be taken out of the evidence analysis phase of an investigation. New breakthroughs in two-way communication may at last be made viable for widespread use as ITC devices grow more sophisticated. We are at the beginning of a new cycle of paranormal exploration, in which the endlessly fertile minds of humans will devise new ways of parsing the data that has been so laboriously gathered.
Italian Interdisciplinary Laboratory
The Italian organization Il Laboratorio is a research group devoted to the study of paranormal phenomena. Not content with ordinary levels of investigative scrutiny, they take a very rigorous approach to the subject. They use the latest technologies and equipment to analyze the results of their experiments. They have been able to quantify the data they have analyzed so scrupulously that skeptics may be flabbergasted at their findings. They made a presentation at an EVP conference in 2006, which you can find at the American Association of Electronic Voice Phenomena web page (
Anomalous Results
In controlled experiments, scientists have come across many anomalies in EVPs. The acoustic measurements revealed the presence of significant structural anomalies deviating from normal human speech parameters, even when the sentence was spoken in a loud, clear voice.
A ringing sound, similar to that produced by a call bell, preceded the words. No one heard such a ring during the experiment. The measurements carried out on the second sentence confirmed the presence of important anomalies in the voice structure. The presence of the fundamental frequency without the consequent vibration of vocal cords is inexplicable. It must be said that, in normal human speech, only the vibration of vocal cords generates the fundamental frequency.
The researchers found anomalies associated with the vowel sounds and concluded that, quite simply, the sounds were not made by a human voice.
When paranormal investigators started using technology to explore the supernatural, skeptics termed it pseudoscience. Paranormal investigators who strictly follow the scientific method hope to debunk the debunkers with their methodology.
May I Ask Who's Calling?
The lab analyzed an EVP recorded during a telephone conversation. The voice of a young girl of sixteen who had been killed by a car was analyzed by software the FBI uses to identify images.
The acoustic map produced by the digital audio was subjected to a comparative analysis of the girl's living voice and a match was found. Even when the girl's audio file was buried in a sea of 950 other voices, the FBI Image Searching software identified it as a match.
Who Goes There?
Il Laboratorio also uses anthropometric face recognition software in its investigations. Features are mapped with the FaceIt software used by forensic detectives and airport security. It works by measuring the distances between certain facial reference points. The software has a recognition accuracy that reaches 98 percent and can even recognize people in disguise.
The lab used this software to analyze a photo of a young man, a musician named Massimo Castagnini, who died in a car accident. On the one-year anniversary of his death, his friends and band-mates decided to honor him by holding a concert party. One of his friends shot about seventy pictures of the event. When the film was processed, he noticed one picture was very unusual, with loud colors and wild luminous streaks.
The strangeness of the photo made Massimo's mother take a closer look and she and a few friends were greatly amazed to see what seemed to be a blurry, semitransparent face that bore an uncanny resemblance to Massimo. The figure appeared holding something that seemed to be a microphone in his hand. When comparing the analysis of the strange photo to an old photo of Massimo, the FaceIt software picked the young man's image out of a database of 2,048 faces.
The beauty of using computer software programs to conduct evidence analysis is that the risk of human error is taken out of the equation and the statistical likelihood of the event occurring by chance is plainly seen to be negligible.
