WhiteNoise

Crawford County Illinois
Ghost Hunters Society

                   White Noise - The Mask of Deception?

           In order to use white noise on investigations you should know what it is. I do not recommend using white noise for EVP investigations. After reading about what white noise is you should be able to decide why this method for recording EVP can not be looked at from a scientific point of view. I will discuss how to use white noise for conducting EVP investigations just so you can experiment and make your own decision on whether or not you will use white noise on your EVP investigations. Now lets look at what white noise really is!

          White noise is a type of noise that is produced by combining sounds of all different frequencies together. If you took all of the imaginable tones that a human can hear and combined them together, you would have white noise.

         The adjective "white" is used to describe this type of noise because of the way white light works. White light is light that is made up of all of the different colors (frequencies) of light combined together (a prism or a rainbow separates white light back into its component colors). In the same way, white noise is a combination of all of the different frequencies of sound. You can think of white noise as 20,000 tones all playing at the same time.

          Because white noise contains all frequencies, it is frequently used to cover or mask other sounds. If you are in a hotel and voices from the room next-door are leaking into your room, you might turn on a fan to drown out the voices. The fan produces a good amount of white noise. Why does that work? Why does white noise drown out voices?

          Here is one way to think about it. Let's say two people are talking at the same time. Your brain can normally "pick out" one of the two voices and actually listen to it and understand it. If three people are talking simultaneously, your brain can probably still pick out one voice. However, if 1,000 people are talking simultaneously, there is no way that your brain can pick out one voice. It turns out that 1,000 people talking together sounds a lot like white noise. So when you turn on a fan to create white noise, you are essentially creating a source of 1,000 voices. The voice next-door makes it 1,001 voices, and your brain can't pick it out any more.

         To understand the promise of white noise, one must first understand its mechanics. In its purest form, it is not really noise at all. White noise, which is also known as white sound, is a combination of sound frequencies in equal amounts. Just like a white beam of light is made up of all the colors in the color spectrum, white noise is made up of all the sound frequencies. Because it incorporates all sound frequencies from high sounds to very low sounds, it has a very beneficial noise canceling or "masking" effect. In the audible spectrum, white noise is a hiss or a roar, such as that produced when a television set is tuned to a channel over which no station is broadcasting.

         White noise is noise with auto correlation function zero everywhere but at 0, and is also called Johnson noise. It has a 1/f 0 frequency spectrum. The noise produced by a resistor is also white noise.

         It contains every frequency within the range of human hearing (generally from 20 hertz to 20 kHz) in equal amounts. Most people perceive this sound as having more high-frequency content than low, but this is not the case. This perception occurs because each successive octave has twice as many frequencies as the one preceding it. For example, from 100 Hz to 200 Hz, there are one hundred discrete frequencies. In the next octave (from 200 Hz to 400 Hz), there are two hundred frequencies.

         Pink noise is a variant of white noise. Pink noise is white noise that has been filtered to reduce the volume at each octave. This is done to compensate for the increase in the number of frequencies per octave. Each octave is then reduced by 6 decibels, resulting in a noise sound wave that has equal energy at every octave.

         When conducting an EVP investigation it make sense that white noise will cover up the soft whispers of the dead and not enhance them like some investigators claim! In order to use white noise on investigations it must be played from a computer generated program and not from a CD in a portable radio! If you use a radio or even a TV tuned into a white noise station to record EVP the authenticity of your EVP should be questioned. Voices can bleed through on different radio or TV stations causing you to pick up unearthly sounding voices that are not caused by the spirits of the dead. In my opinion White Noise will never be a scientific approach to recording EVP because of the fact that you could be picking up something else on other frequencies bleeding through.

         To try white noise on your investigations you need a source other then a radio, TV, or fan. The best way is to use a white noise generator on a laptop computer. Just play the white noise in the back ground as you are recording. You may ask questions or remain quite. When you play the recorder back sometimes voices can be heard.

         Some investigators believe that the spirits use the white noise to sort of “surf” in on! I believe that if an EVP is captured using white noise, the spirit was very close to microphone and very loud in order to get through the noise. If this is the case it could make the voice easy to pick out among the background noise and make it sort of stand out. It is rare for this to happen and more often then not white noise is just a cover up. It masks the soft whispers of the dead that are often in the back ground that white noise is designed to cover up in the first place. This is why some people use White Noise generators to sleep at night. It covers up the background noises that paranormal investigators must be able to here when conducting EVP investigations and is only a crutch for capturing EVP.

The Crawford County Illinois Ghost Hunters Society does not endorse the use of white noise on investigations!

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