Serious parapsychologists today show virtually no interest in EVP, and modern reports in the parapsychological literature find no evidence of anything paranormal in such recordings. That does not deter the devoted, of course: it is claimed that there are more than 50,000 sites on the internet devoted to EVP! Again, an example from the Internet:
“Briefly, electronic voice phenomenon (EVP) is the process of capturing messages from the spirit world, including our loved ones in Heaven, by using an ordinary tape recorder. Yes, someone in your family or your special friend who has passed on, can record or imprint their voice onto your tape. It is not the scope of our [web] site to fully explain EVP, but please feel free to visit the learning links below for more information. Our site is designed to help you, the beginner, succeed with EVP”
(www.paranormalnetwork.com)

And now it is claimed that one does not even need to be quiet while making the recordings – the voices often show up in the background while one is recording a conversation. Consider these examples (from www.paranormalnetwork.com).
Examples:

Voice of the dead?
Here, we are told to listen for a whispery woman's voice saying "we all turn this way" or "we all turn that way" recorded by “Karen and Jill” at Edgar Allen Poe's grave on his birthday. (The salient part of the recording is repeated five times so that you can catch it.)
[Listen]

Voice of the dead?
In the middle of the recording, we are told that a voice whispers “Pat!"
[Listen]

There is no end to the efforts people will make to find “voices.” For example, it is claimed that:

“Some voices of spirits or entities are very close to the background level of static; Others may be clearly heard. If the speech is difficult to understand, remember that the spirit talking may be talking in a language or dialog that is not in common usage today. The voice can also be in reverse, you would need a computer to reverse this to hear it.”
(www.blueskies.org)

As yet another example of the unbridled enthusiasm and creativity associated with finding voices, consider the American Association of Electronic Voice Phenomena. Its website informs us that:
“The membership includes people who record paranormal voices, pictures and information from friends and loved ones on the other side through tape recorders, telephones, fax machines, television, computers and video recorders.”
“EVP has been featured in such technical publications as “Popular Mechanics" and "wireless world." It was recently shown in a movie called "the sixth sense". Sarah Estep, one of the world's foremost EVP recorders, has been featured on cable channels such as discovery and Sci-Fi with her numerous EVP recordings. Why EVP remains unknown by the general public continues to astound us. EVP can provide a huge sense of relief for the bereaved and documented proof for paranormal investigators.”

And if one surfs the web, sooner or later, one finds sites that offer to sell devices to help you obtain better recordings!

Well, if the voices aren’t spirits, what are they?
Cross-modulation. This is a common phenomenon; I first became aware of it in the 1960s when my “record player” clearly picked up a local radio station, which one could hear between cuts.
But Raudive dismissed this possibility, saying that it cannot be radio since one never hears music or other obvious elements of radio transmission.

Apophenia. This refers to a common perceptual phenomenon whereby we spontaneously perceive connections and find meaningfulness in unrelated things. In other words, it involves seeing or hearing patterns where in reality, none exist. A visual example is the Rorschach Inkblot test.

We may be the best pattern detectors that exist, but not all the patterns we find have any objective meaning. However, once we think we have detected a pattern, it is hard to ignore it, and generally, we take it to be meaningful. A common example of apophenia occurs when people are in the shower, and mistakenly think that they hear their door bell or telephone ringing. The white noise produced by the shower contains a broad spectrum of sounds, including those that make up ringing bells. The ear picks out certain sounds from the spectrum, and we “detect” a pattern corresponding roughly to a bell.

(Apophenia is virtually synonymous with what has been called Pareidolia, an illusion involving misperception of an external stimulus; an obscure stimulus is viewed as something clear and distinct. Examples include instances such as when thousands of people in New Mexico saw the face of Jesus on a Tortilla chip in 1978. This perception, or misperception, does not involve conscious effort or any particular mental set, and the illusion does not vanish even when one pays closer attention to the stimulus because it is so ambiguous that it has no objective meaning at all.
(See http://thefolklorist.com/ for many examples)

While you might accept apophenia as an explanation for voices barely discernable from static, as in the earlier examples above, can it account for the “clear voices’ in the later examples (e.g. – recall the word “Pat” from the tape)? First of all, of course, the extraneous voices, if really there, could be the result of intended or unintended background interruptions by real people – the recordings were not made under any sort of controlled conditions. Secondly, as is discussed below, it is fascinating just how easy it is for our brains to come to interpret certain noise patterns as words, once we know what the words are supposed to be.

Perception is a very complex process, and when our brains try to find patterns, they are guided in part by what we expect to hear. If you are trying to hear your friend while conversing in a noisy room, your brain automatically takes snippets of sound and compares them against possible corresponding words, and guided by context, we can often “hear” more clearly than the sound patterns reaching our ears could account for. Indeed, it is relatively easy to demonstrate in a psychology laboratory that people can readily come to hear “clearly” even very muffled voices, so long as they have a printed version in front of them that tells them what words are being spoken. The brain puts together the visual cue and the auditory input, and we actually “hear” what we are informed is being said, even though without that information, we could discern nothing. Going one step further, and we can demonstrate that people can clearly “hear” voices and words not just in the context of muddled voices, but in a pattern of white noise, a pattern in which there are no voices or words at all.

Given that we can routinely demonstrate this effect, it is only parsimonious to suggest that what people hear with EVP is also the product of their own brains, and their expectations, rather than the voices of the dearly departed.

We can describe the process, leading from mental set to expectation to perception to amazement to belief in the following general way (see graphic): We are told that tape recordings made with no one around contain mysterious voices. This sets up a mental set that motivates us to try to discern voices. That is, we must presume that there may be something there, or we would not waste our time in listening. If others have told us what the voices seem to say, this expectancy influences our auditory perception, so that our brains match up bits of random noise to the words that we expect to hear. Of course, if we play the same piece of tape over and over, as is explicitly recommended by some of the web sites cited earlier, and if we do everything we can to focus our attention on the "noise" (perhaps by listening through headphones, again as recommended by the web sites), then we not only increase the likelihood of discerning voices if they really are there, but we maximize the opportunity for the perceptual apparatus in our brain to "construct" voices that do not exist, to detect patterns that match up with our expectations. Then, once we “hear” the voices, then it is easy, given the mental set that is usually involved, to attribute them to deceased individuals. This interpretation is likely to produce an impressive emotional reaction, and since we have now heard what we set out to hear (our expectancy is fulfilled) our belief in the reality of the voices of the dead grows, and this may be rewarding in various ways. Such an outcome is likely to heighten the expectation that we will hear more voices the next time we listen to such tapes.

How can someone who has heard the voices be persuaded to be more critical and to examine more mundane possibilities?

A rational, deliberative discussion is rarely helpful because clear evidence or logic is not involved. Believers are reporting an experience that was highly meaningful and perhaps highly emotional to them – not something that is easily challenged by logic. Moreover, there is a self-selection of people predisposed to believe – the voices are compatible with their belief system.

Remember – we process information in two different ways through two more or less separate parts of our brain and nervous system. On the one hand, part of our brain works on a very intuitive / emotional / automatic level, and on the other hand, another part of our brain works according to the logic and rationality that we develop over our lifetimes. These two systems often produce contrary results, and this is especially so where paranormal phenomena are involved. The “believer” removes the contradiction by bringing the intellect into line with the intuitive interpretation, that is, by coming to accept the paranormal – in this case, the voices – as reality, and thereby reshaping the intellectual understanding of the world so that belief in such phenomena appears to be rational. Over time, an impregnable belief system develops which is supported by a very substantial base of personal experience (interpreted in such a way as to support the paranormal belief), as well as anecdotal evidence provided by others.

It is very difficult to change such deeply held beliefs, especially if they include a significant emotional component. Consider this example: In my work as a clinical psychologist, a father wanted me to “cure” his gay son. I asked the father how easy would it be for me to turn him (the father) into a gay person? “No way !!!,” he said. I told him that it would likely be as difficult to turn his son into a straight person as it would be to make him, the father, turn gay. Fortunately, he saw the point and came to accept his son as he was. My point is this: When we ask how to turn believers into skeptics, let us ask instead: “How easy would it be for me to persuade you that voices on a tape really are spirits of the dead?” Well, that is probably just how easy it would be to persuade devoted believers that their beliefs about the voices are wrong.

What the Raudive voices teach us is that intelligent people – for Raudive was no doubt an intelligent man - can come to believe fervently in phenomena which in all likelihood do not exist. There is a lesson in this for all of us, for we just as surely may be mistaken in some of our own deeply held convictions. This is why we must rely on science as the avenue to truth rather than personal experience or other people's anecdotal reports. Science, with its reliance on data and its insistence on looking for sources of error and for alternative explanations, provides the best method that humans have produced for protecting against error and self-delusion. Electronic Voice Phenomena are the products of hope and expectation; the claims wither away under the light of scientific scrutiny.