Page 319 November 2009
Radio Sweep Techniques & Findings
By Dr Ingrid Irwin
RS - Radio Sweep Method
The term Radio-Sweep or RS for short is a technology-based form of EVP recording that has developed into one ofthe most popular forms of current EVP recording. I will be
posting some RS captures in the “EVP Submissions” section
so would like to discuss this form of recording as the defini-tions of Radio Sweep Methods may be unclear to some peo-ple.
A “
Radio-Sweep
” is comprised of technology
-based
equipment such as a “
hacked
” Radio that sweeps the AM or
FM band. The rapid sweeping of the broad spectrum ofradio stations means the reception received from radiostations is broken into small audio snippets, or small burstsof audio sound as it scans continuously without stopping ata radio station. It is importantthe scan is quick enough that itdoes not pick up completewords from any stations itsweeps over.The theory lies in thethought that paranormal influ-ences can use these snippets ofsound to form words or phrases.This is termed "
Transform EVP
"and in this case the radio sweepprocess is transformed ormorphed into anomalousspeech.
Voice Characteristics
The most common examples of RS captures seem to beshort one-syllable words, choppy sounding in structure andscattered randomly along the sweep. They do not seem tobe observant of the environment, do not hold any meaning-ful content, or have intelligent speech attributes.
The other form is a “
Sweep Induced Capture
”, these
have voice-like characteristics, are independent of theradio snippets, and seem to be natural sounding voices.This type of voice messages seems to be riding on top ofthe radio sweep and the snippets of noise, are longerphrases made up of contextual information. Some of thesetypes of communication are almost a cross between DRV(see below) and RS, these are not heard at the time, buton playback are contextual messages of clear voice forma-tion. This form of speech construction is what we are look-ing for in RS Techniques.
DRV - Direct Radio Voice Method
DRV or Direct Radio Voice is a rarer form of anomalousspeech as these voices are not related to noise. They areloud, clear messages that are independent of the radio en-tirely, often the radio is not tuned to a station at thetime. These voices are heard acoustically in real time; ques-tions can be asked, and clear responses can be heard. Thisform of EVP is a rare event and an example would be the
“Spiricom” device of the early 1980‟s, keep in mind the“Spiricom” device was never tested or investigated by out-
side sources and thus cannot be confirmed as real anomalouscommunication.
The Problem of RS Techniques to be aware of whenrecording
The existing problems withgeneral radio sweep techniquesis the high possibility of falsepositives, noises interpreted asvoice-like sounds. Any noise cansound like speech if a person is
listening in „speech mode‟ and
the more voice-like featuresthat noise can consist of, due torandom frequencies andrhythm, the more susceptiblewe become at interpretingnoise as words. RS techniqueshave many peaks in the fre-quency spectra due to thesweep effect thus, a muchhigher chance that the har-monic ratio and formant noise may be interpreted as sound-ing like speech.A common misconception is that a sweep is fast enoughthat no complete words could come through a single station,
thus anything intelligible that is heard must be ”spirit com-munication” and could not be a random effect of parts of
human speech fragmented to sound like words. This is incor-rect as all language is built from units; words are sequencesof smaller units known as speech sounds/tones or phonemes.It is very easy to hear one or two syllable words out of noise;
we are „hard wired‟ to fill in the gaps with likely words
based on experience, context and expectation. This meansshort random 'voice like words' with no contextual, relevant,or meaningful information are being confirmed as anomalouscommunication.
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