Paranormal Researcher Michael Esposito Discusses Link Between EVPs and Experimental Music [Interview]
Welcome back to DEAD Time. Paranormal investigators have been capturing sounds known as electronic voice phenomena or EVPs for years. Parapsychologist Konstantīns Raudive popularized the idea in the 1970s and described EVP as “typically brief, usually the length of a word or short phrase.” Some in the paranormal community believe that EVPs are the voices of the dead, while skeptics think they are just random sounds or even hoaxes.
Michael Esposito is an experimental sound artist and researcher in EVPs and the co-founder of Phantom Airwaves, an institution focused on the study and education of EVP research. Esposito has developed theories and testing methods of capturing and analyzing EVPs using frequences commonly found in relation to experimental music. He is a descendant of Alfred Vail, who invented the Morse Code and several early telegraph devices with his partner Samuel Morse. These inventions inspired the spiritualist movement of the middle 1800s, and the telegraph was used to attempt to communicate with spirits. Another of Esposito’s ancestors, Jonathan Harned Vail was an assistant to Thomas Edison, who eventually tried to invent a device to be used to communicate with the dead.
Over the years, Esposito has participated in hundreds of paranormal investigations and captured thousands of EVPs. Michael studied communication theory at Purdue University, University of Notre Dame, American University in Cairo, Egypt and Governor’s State University.
Recently, Bloody Disgusting had the pleasure of talking with Michael Esposito about his research on EVPs, theories and techniques, and the relationship between experimental music and electronic voice phenomena.
Bloody Disgusting: Which came first, your interest in music or your interest in the paranormal, and what was your first paranormal experience?
Michael Esposito: My interest in EVPs, at least my awareness of it, came through music, and the design of it was due to an accident. I got hit by a car in Chicago and it broke my leg in half. I was lying in the middle of the street and there was this blonde guy holding my head up and he just kept repeating, “It’s going to be alright. It’s going to be alright.” Then the ambulance came and got me. When the attorneys were doing interviews for the lawsuit, no one had seen the blonde guy at all, and there were a lot of witnesses.
One of the operations I had, the bone wasn’t growing together, and the anesthetist was telling me how close to death he was going to take me without dying. In between the time I went out and when I woke up, there was absolutely nothing. It was like someone had cut a piece out of my world with my life or threw me into a really bad depression. I had been building mid tower computers from scratch; I was hacking and modifying computers back then. And I was in a German terror tech recording studios board, and I was trying to mod to hack the frequency ranges below 20 and above 20 kHz and I ran into some talk about electronic voice phenomena, and it was really intriguing. I tried it and immediately I was getting voices. I thought, “Well, if I’m getting these voices, then there’s got to be something.” It pulled me out of a really horrible depression, and I realized that there must be something. And I’ve been literally doing it ever since.
Now apart from that music connection, some of the early EVP stuff I found was on Touch Records out of the UK. I started to communicate with them and some of my early stuff and I was signed by Touch for publishing rights. This was about 30 years ago, so it’s been quite a while. When I was young, I was always into more psychedelic, experimental music. I think my first favorite band was Pink Floyd. Yes was my second favorite band with more of their longer, sweet pieces like, “You’re Close to the Edge” or “Gates of Delirium.” Basically, I always leaned towards the experimental or the obscure underground stuff. So, I’ve always been kind of in that realm.
BD: So, it sounds like the music and the paranormal stuff sort of happened simultaneously for you.
ME: Yeah, it was very parallel, if not intertwined from the beginning. So, obviously the natural medium I would choose to publish my results or to propagate the study of electronic voice phenomena would be music, experimental underground music, I guess. I don’t know if you’ve had a chance to look at my discography, but it’s pretty extensive; there’s a lot on bandcamp. Basically, if you type in my name and EVP after it on a search engine, you’ll find quite a bit of stuff as well.
BD: I actually did that [laughs].
ME: [laughs] It’s pretty prolific. Last night, I was working on some Mesoamerican Archaeoacoustics. They’ve actually got a field of study for it now. They call it Archaeoacoustics for sounds that were derived or actually used in ancient civilizations. Adi Newton, from ClockDVA, and I have a band called MATAR and we focus on Archaeoacoustics. We went all around Southern England, Stonehenge, the Hurlers, and all those places and made recordings. We built an album from the findings from these ancient, primitive, probably pre-Celtic sites and it’s actually called Archaeoacoustics.
The album I’m working on now with that is recordings I did in Chichén Itzá and the Mayan Riviera in Mexico along that edge of the gulf over the last couple of years, where there was a lot of human sacrifice, and a lot of strange ways. One of the interesting things, and it was truly an Archaeoacoustic moment, was not only am I looking for remnants of sound or voices that have remained in the area, but they were demonstrating how if you stand at the stairs of the main pyramid in Chichén Itzá and you clap, it provides a really strange echo with a very metallic ting to it. If you stand to the left or right of it, you don’t get that, but only if you stand in that exact spot, which I’m sure the High Priests of the day would make use of that to inspire the population.
BD: What are your thoughts on residual versus intelligent EVPs?
ME: When I lecture, and I talk about this I always talk about energy and that everything is based on energy. All of our thoughts, our desires, our growth, our knowledge, everything that isn’t physical is energy. I liken it to a flash drive. The physical body of the flash drive, the magnet and the electronics, and the casing, is like our human body with our brain and all of our mechanical functions that we have and our sensory input like our eyes and ears and our nerve endings. But the actual information itself is energy. It’s the same with the flash drive; all the information that’s on the flash drive is actually energy. Einstein had surmised that energy could never be destroyed or created; it’s either resting or it’s kinetic. In other words, it’s either passively resting or it’s kinetic; it’s actively working as energy. So, if you look at that, when we die, what remains? When our bodies decompose, they become a chemical energy within themselves; but all of our personality, the resilience of our personality is energy. So, it cannot be destroyed, so it remains. Then you have to ask, “What form would it remain in and what are the properties of it?” That’s a lot of what I deal with in the research end of what I do.
If it’s a kinetic or a resting energy, is it possible that when we pick up residual EVP, what we’re getting is basically tape replay or microsounds. It’s very possible that EVPs are happening around you all the time; the voices are speaking, some active, some passive, and some interactive. I started to deconstruct electronic voice phenomena because I wanted to know how it worked. To find out how it works, you have to deconstruct something. Basically, take it apart and see if you put it together, or put it together different ways, or see what the properties of it are and how they fit together. So, in the deconstruction of it, when we record electronic voice phenomena, we’re capturing something that we don’t hear, necessarily, with the naked ear, we compress it onto the tape. All recording devices are analog and digital, or just analog. If they’re using magnetic tape, they’re purely analog, and if they’re digital recorders, they’re not just digital; there is an analog feature to them that is the microphone. All microphones are the same; they’re magnets wrapped in coil in copper wire. What that does is it takes a slice out of the atmosphere, and it compresses it and puts it onto a storage medium. So, when you compress something, what are you doing? You’re adding amplification to it. If you have a granular cloud of fragments of sound that can’t be heard by the human ear because they’re too small, they hang together because of Einstein’s like energy. Einstein said that like energy attracts.
So, if all these bits of fragments of energy have similar characteristics, they very well hang together. When we cut through it with a microphone and compress a section of it, we’re compressing it, and on playback we hear certain audible fragments or fragments of speech that we weren’t able to hear naturally with the human ear, which explains a lot of things. I’ve also caught reverse speech phenomenon. David Oates out of Australia has got some fine work he’s done on reverse speech, where he’s taken famous people’s speeches and reversed them and he’s come up with some interesting theorems. He says that when you hear reverse speech it either completes something you’re thinking or saying, or if you’re lying, it tells the truth about what you’re really thinking or saying. So, if we’re cutting a slice of this granular cloud of voices, we’re compressing them and then we play them back. That would explain how if we reverse it, sometimes we get voices that say different things; sometimes they say the exact same thing, which is actually physically impossible under normal aesthetics.
I always flip my files. If I catch an EVP, I’ll flip it to see if there is anything in the reverse side of it, which is actually a good standard because you’d be surprised. Sometimes I’ve found EVPs that I couldn’t make out whatsoever or it didn’t make any sense, and I flipped it, and it said something important and bright and clear. I found a couple last night that were like that that might have been Mayan. No one spoke Mayan and they don’t even know how it sounded. But flipping it, it said something very clear in English. I record all over the world and a lot of people ask me why I get voices in English, as well as a lot of the native countries that I’m recording in, and I’ll use an interpreter or I know enough of different languages to be able to pick out that something is French or German, but I get a lot in English, too. But people ask why I get a lot that are in English as well. I’ve been working on that question for years and I was thinking, “Well, how does energy communicate? Does it actually communicate in the physics of word or in the engine of intent?” So, if I’m an English speaker and I capture an intent of energy, would I recognize it in English or would I recognize it in a foreign language?
BD: Do you have a favorite haunted location and what do you consider the most compelling EVP you’ve captured?
ME: I’ve been to a lot of wonderful sites. I think abroad would be the last trenches of the Western Front in Belgium. Here in the States, it would definitely be the Sallie House in Atchison, Kansas. I’ve probably been there more than any other investigator. That place was strange. It would call to you, and you would just have this strange urge to go. I was a commodity broker, and I had an office at the border. One day it was just screaming at me. I finished the call I was on and got up and closed up my office and got in my car and drove to Kansas. I had no idea why.
I was driving and hearing on the news that this bridge collapsed in Wisconsin and killed a bunch of people. I was on the road, and I thought I should probably call someone and let them know where I’m going [laughs]. So, I called my buddy, and I said, “I don’t know why, but I’m on my way down to Atchison.” The house is completely vacant. Amelia Earhart was born and raised on the corner. But the place is wrong; you have to cross a bridge to get to it. It’s called Amelia Earhart Bridge. I don’t know why you would name a bridge after a missing aviator [laughs]. So, the whole town is just bizarre as hell. But the house is where the Pickmans had all their trouble. They made a movie about it called The Heartland Ghost. It’s pretty well known, but it’s completely empty. When I got there, I knew where the owner kept the key, so I could go in. When I got there, the windows were all open and curtains were blowing in the windows. I was on the porch and the whole place was furnished. I was thinking, “This can’t be right.” I literally blinked my eyes, and everything was boarded up and empty again. The windows were all sealed up, so none of that was real. So, I got myself a room in a hotel and I thought, “No, this is way too bad.” [laughs] It was literally calling me. Still today, it will evade my thoughts and call me to come down to it.
BD: What do you consider to be the most compelling EVP that you’ve captured?
ME: Well, there’s a lot of them. You’re going to ask about the blue and the gold, right? The blue and the gold could catch the light. The reason I said in the past that’s my most compelling EVP is because it literally took a life of its own. The message became more important than the fact that this was an Irish woman’s ghost speaking. It took a life of its own and everybody was trying to figure out the message and a lot of work was done on what the message was. The blue and the gold and they looked at different chakras and we tried things with filters and light filters and blue and gold, obviously. A lot of the EVPs I’ve captured at my family farm because I think there’s a really big connection between what we talked about with light energy attraction. And I think there’s a real attraction to ancestral trees and family trees. I’ve been working on some ideas that when you’re a baby or you give birth to a baby that you don’t just pass down pieces of DNA and physical attributes and stuff, but a lot of the pieces and fragments of personality traits that you pass down are energy. So, you literally pass down pieces of energy from your complete family tree.
So, I think that when you’re recording ancestral areas your connection to the energy of the residual spirits that might be there lingering is stronger. There’s a story about when I was down at my family farm in Effingham, Illinois, I got the voice of my uncle saying, “Mark is dreaming.” I sent it to my cousin Mark, who has since passed from brain cancer. When he was alive, I sent it to him, and I didn’t tell him anything about it. I said, “I captured this at the family farm.” He came back and said, “That’s my dad!” [laughs] He was talking about Mark, “Mark is dreaming.” Maybe five or six years later Mark passed, but before he died when he knew he was ill, he asked me to come over and I did. I did these recordings of him to see if there were any spirits around him and to this day, I’ve been afraid to listen to them. I need to one day, but I’m not ready to yet [laughs].
Learn more about Michael Esposito and his band MATAR and experimental music.
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