Electronic voice phenomenon (EVP) is the claim that voices of the dead can be captured on audio recordings, usually buried in tape hiss, static or radio noise. The idea grew around Friedrich Jürgenson (1903–1987), a painter and film-maker who reported hearing stray voices on recordings of birdsong made in his garden, and the Latvian writer Konstantīns Raudive (1909–1974), whose book Breakthrough, published in English in 1971, made Raudive voices widely known.
There is no scientific evidence that such voices are anything other than ordinary sound misheard. Researchers point to stray radio transmissions, investigators’ own voices and processing artefacts, and to pareidolia, the tendency to hear words in random noise. A 2015 perception study found that telling listeners a test concerned the paranormal raised the number of voices they reported, while they rarely agreed on what was said. As an aesthetic, EVP has been taken up by experimental labels: Ash International issued The Ghost Orchid: An Introduction to EVP in 1999 and later an album of Jürgenson’s own tapes, offering hiss and half-heard speech for close listening.