EVP's and who can here them. One of my blogs from the past!

I had a thought today and was wondering if anyone else has ever thought of this. Does anyone remember awhile back in the news how kids were sending messages at school using a ringtone that only they could hear because of their age. http://www.nytimes.com/2006/06/12/technology/12ring.html

I was wondering if the same was for EVPs. Can kids hear something that us adults might not be able to hear? When we listen we can be missing tons because of our age. I know my daughter can hear lots of things I can't and she is 5 and I'm 27. Has this been tested?

What can we be missing?

Oh the high-pitched ringtones? (I tried finding one of those to download awhile ago.) In my Audio class I had couple quarters ago, our professor played different levels of sounds, from really low to very high. The human ears can hear roughly around 20,000 Hz. Dolphins, on the other hand can produce whistles in the frequency range from 1,000-100,000 Hz. When our professor played these sounds, I was still able to hear higher pitched sounds than him (as he is much older than I), as well as some of the rest of the class (I think it was around 25-35 KHz).

I don't think EVPs necessarily relate to this though, as it would be odd for spirits to be speaking at such a high frequency.

[GHoST].Jeanette wrote:

I don't think EVPs necessarily relate to this though, as it would be odd for spirits to be speaking at such a high frequency.

But do we really though this! Are we spirits? No. I just think that age might be a big player in who might hear what! Hearing fades over time so you might be able to hear an evp that I might not hear. It just makes me what what I might have missed in the past.

I think there's a difference between not being able to hear (as in needing to turn up the volume or wear a hearing aid) and not being able to hear certain frequencies.
As you get older, it's harder for your ears to hear high pitched frequencies (something probably higher than 15,000Hz). A musical note is probably somewhere around 440Hz. In my opinion, I doubt anything talking would be at such a high pitch that it'd be difficult to hear.

The problem that I see with this is that yes, an audio recorder can record things we cannot hear, but upon playback, we still cannot hear them (such as high frequencies). It's no different than hearing those high frequencies in person. They may be on that recordrer playing, but you may not be able to hear it at all. So, if we are able to hear ghost voices on tape, I'd imagine it'd be something far more complicated and beyond our own understanding, and also not a very high or very low frequency.

Hmmm...I posted this morning here...I must have hit preview instead of send and then logged out- I'll attempt to re-create:

Actually, I think that this is not too terribly far-fetched: EVP's are created through ambient sound and imprinted on recording media. We know that 99.95% of the time they are not audible to the human ear and can only be heard upon playback. How much background noise is actually beyond standard range of hearing? (I really would only be blindly guessing, but it seems likely that the answer is: alot.)
It also seems apparent that children (and animals for that matter) are more attuned to the spirit world in general - maybe the cause could be due to audio?

This is all of course total speculation, but I would be interested to see if anyone has studied this...

Right - I think the fact that ghost voices cannot be heard by human ears (and thus need to be recorded - therefore becoming EVPs) is how and why these two topics became intertwinded. Humans can only hear between 20 Hz (the lowest) up to around 20 KHz, on average. Anything (on average) above or below, we miss out on. For instance, a number of animals are fully capable of hearing extremely low frequencies, such as those produced by earthquakes (ie. elphants), as proven through experience and testing. Other animals, like dolphins I had mentioned, can hear much higher frequencies than we can and can also produce noises of those frequencies. Any of these sounds are examples of the sounds that are not audible to the human ears.

For the example of children being fine-tuned to the spiritual world, that might help your argument, minus the fact that children tend to see spirits more in addition, which clearly doesn't relate to sound at all. Even if high frequencies did play a part, that doesn't explain why children would be able to see things that we cannot. See my point?

I'm no specialist on this sort of thing. I wonder if DPS's Kevin would have any opinions.

I'll start off by saying that I just heard this ringtone...and my head hurts - so at the ripe age of 33 I can hear it clearly from 15 feet away.

So, Jeanette's line of thinking has me speculating again - what if (and this is really the anti-scientific method, so don't take it as any kind of legitimate hypothesis.) what if children see more because they actually can hear - what if the visual aspect of 'haunting' is an attempt to get the attention of those who are listening. To put it another way, children SEE more because they are actually paying attention. If someone is standing behind you, you will not see them - but if that someone says "hey you!" then you turn around and they are there - maybe children just happen to be the ones that can hear the "hey you!"
Once again - this topic is alot of 'thinking out loud' ...but hey, that describes most of the paranormal field.

Being able to hear more as a child has to do with certain filters that later develop in one's brain later on as you age. For instance, certain people may hear one thing in a fusion of sounds, while others miss that sound entirely and hear something else. Each person has their own filters and so each is different. As a child, you have yet to develop these mental filters to sort audio sounds, so any incoming stimulus children will detect. This is entirely something on its own and unrelated to high pitched frequencies though.

yeah, I was going to say I think its more phsychological than just being able to hear better as a child. Being more open minded and creative as a child (having less "filters") might play a role in seeing and/or hearing more paranormal things. I don't necessarily think that hearing better as a child creates more sightings as a child. Separately, I think you hear better and see different things because of how the mind works.