Looking for Skeptics

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calebprime said:
I'm in total agreement with this commenter:




For me, hearing that is instant "flight or fight". I have to get out of there fast, or I'm worried I'd start breaking furniture.

I lasted 10 seconds. Tried it again. Nope. Gotta go, sorry.

oh, and then Brett says:



Yup. My ear, so to speak, is a smoking gun. (Block that metaphor.)
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Doesn't do it for me, either. I think it's the fact that the voice is so quiet that it sounds forced, and occasionally squeaky, together with the relative amplification of sounds of lips smacking and so on.
 
calebprime said:
Oh, what the heck. Feel free to try to hear anything going on in these two:

In this recording, I set the built-in mic input volume to the center -- neither loud nor soft. This is recorded in a "quiet" room*, however, so almost all the ambient noise is coming from the computer's fans. (A Macintosh):
called: built-in mic input med vol.aiff
https://app.box.com/s/gxaw9lhcoo5z9tmrt3mo


Same recording, but, using SoundTrack Pro, I boosted the volume so that it would peak at -20db. So there's now some audible white/pink noise:
called: b-in mic inp Hijk.2 -20
https://app.box.com/s/j1mu259u007sjodjhjlp


Because I have the originals of these files on my computer, I can always do a
"negative phase" cancellation test to see if anything has been altered.

I also experimented with boosting the volume all the way to 0db, and then using noise reduction -- just to see what it would sound like. I'm not going to post this, because there are vaguely-defined artifacts that could inflame the imagination of impressionable souls.

* My "quiet" room is nearly soundproof, but not totally. And also nearly anechoic, but not totally. It's very quiet, and very dead, but not up to pro standards of same.
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Thanks for those. I look forward to hearing what scrappy and flaccon make of them.

I agree that the second one has plently of noise but nothing that I could possibly convince myself was a voice. I mean there are inevitably a few moments where the hiss resembles a fragment of a sibilant sound as if somebody was whispering off-mic, but it's only the odd fragment. You can't have hissy noise without at least some of it accidentally sounding a bit like the sort of hissy noises a person might make.

I gather the first file is the same as the second but at a much lower level. I can't hear that on this particular PC - too much hum on the output.
 
Pixel42 said:
It's been identified more than once (most recently in post #5534) as the ASKE one.
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If that means the SISYPHUS prize or pre-test, she may be out of luck, as it is not running at the moment:
Sisyphus pre-test said:
..The Sisyphus Prize is scheduled to run until September 30th 2013, so there has to be enough time available for the pre-test to be completed.
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According to the SKEPP website, the test and application form are being reworked.

Also, according to SKEPP, the SISYPHUS prize is 10,000 Euros, not 1 million.
 
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Vortigern99 said:
Quinn said:
scrappy said:
Correction, I record in silence. My room is silent.
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This is incorrect. It is a highly significant error. It may even be the error that's causing all your other errors.

Unless your room was specifically designed and constructed by highly-paid professionals for the express purpose of being silent, it is not silent, even if you think it is. It may sound silent to you as you sit there, but that just means the ambient noise is too quiet for you to notice. It is not, however, too quiet for a microphone to pick up. So when you use a microphone to make a recording of what you think is silence, what you're actually recording is the noise that's too quiet for you to hear, but not too quiet for the mic. When you then play back that recording, but turn the volume way up so that the noise that was previously too quiet to hear is now audible, you're hearing noise that was there all along, but that you just didn't notice. And this is exactly the kind of noise that's easy for our brains to impart with patterns that we want to make out.
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Funny how these salient points keep getting ignored by the OP and her henchman. You're recording ambient room sounds that the naked ear cannot detect, and then projecting your own biases into the playback as your brain seeks out patterns in the noise. What is so difficult to grasp about that?
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Exactly. I was in Angel Studios, Islington, London last week sitting in on a recording session, and they had clearly spent a fortune to ensure the studios really are quiet; the doors are about 6" thick sound insulation, and the control room windows are double-glazed about 18" deep. I should have told them they needn't have bothered, because scrappy has a 'quiet' room :rolleyes:

picture.php

Control room looking into studio, showing glazing depth.
 
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dlorde said:
Exactly. I was in Angel Studios, Islington, London last week sitting in on a recording session, and they had clearly spent a fortune to ensure the studios really are quiet [....]
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Even that room isn't silent; the interior walls will reflect sound. For quieter silence*, flaccon needs an anechoic chamber.



*That's like "more unique."

Note to self: 799
 
dlorde said:
Exactly. I was in Angel Studios, Islington, London last week sitting in on a recording session, and they had clearly spent a fortune to ensure the studios really are quiet; the doors are about 6" thick sound insulation, and the control room windows are double-glazed about 18" deep. I should have told them they needn't have bothered, because scrappy has a 'quiet' room :rolleyes:

[qimg]http://www.internationalskeptics.com/forums/picture.php?pictureid=8384&albumid=977&dl=1386081906[/qimg]
Control room looking into studio, showing glazing depth.
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Can't really see in the photo but you would probably also have found that the layers of double glazing are not parallel to stop resonance between the panes.

As xterra points out, that studio's designed to be isolated rather than silent. It excludes external noise as far as possible but quite deliberately doesn't try to absorb all internal sound.
 
zooterkin said:
Doesn't do it for me, either. I think it's the fact that the voice is so quiet that it sounds forced, and occasionally squeaky, together with the relative amplification of sounds of lips smacking and so on.
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Yes, I completely agree. The sibilance of forced whispering, the lack of intelligibility, the inconsistency... set my teeth on edge; I got about ten seconds in before bailing out with a wince (I usually bail out with a bucket, but this was different).
 
Professor Yaffle said:
This is the ASKE challenge:
http://www.aske-skeptics.org.uk/challenge_rules.html
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Ah... yes, that's clearly not the same thing.

£5,000, eh? I rather think that's a more attractive proposition to a would be applicant than £1million, or even £10,000. It sounds more achievable (as if the organizers are expecting winners), and one feels it's a more realistic figure - unlikely to be a fake, and not worth getting the lawyers in to fight the award.

Yes! I'll go for it! ...now, what was my special talent again?
 
calebprime said:
Oh, what the heck. Feel free to try to hear anything going on in these two:

In this recording, I set the built-in mic input volume to the center -- neither loud nor soft. This is recorded in a "quiet" room*, however, so almost all the ambient noise is coming from the computer's fans. (A Macintosh):
called: built-in mic input med vol.aiff
https://app.box.com/s/gxaw9lhcoo5z9tmrt3mo


Same recording, but, using SoundTrack Pro, I boosted the volume so that it would peak at -20db. So there's now some audible white/pink noise:
called: b-in mic inp Hijk.2 -20
https://app.box.com/s/j1mu259u007sjodjhjlp


Because I have the originals of these files on my computer, I can always do a
"negative phase" cancellation test to see if anything has been altered.

I also experimented with boosting the volume all the way to 0db, and then using noise reduction -- just to see what it would sound like. I'm not going to post this, because there are vaguely-defined artifacts that could inflame the imagination of impressionable souls.

* My "quiet" room is nearly soundproof, but not totally. And also nearly anechoic, but not totally. It's very quiet, and very dead, but not up to pro standards of same.
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Hi Caleb, sorry about the delay. I wrote out a reply but it would not post. I haven't had time to get back to the thread since. I am going to be as honest as I was with the other 2 files I heard alter.

Thank you for uploading these files. The first one was total silence. The 2nd one I listened into it carefully, several times. I listened to the hiss, in the hiss and behind the hiss. It was just a loud hiss. Since it went through flaccons PC, I can now hear things behind the hiss. I have made out a few words in certain places. I wont mention the words to anyone yet. I can't get back online for a day or so, but would like to hear your take on it.
 
scrappy said:
...I listened to the hiss, in the hiss and behind the hiss. It was just a loud hiss. Since it went through flaccons PC, I can now hear things behind the hiss. I have made out a few words in certain places. I wont mention the words to anyone yet. I can't get back online for a day or so, but would like to hear your take on it.
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Well, I suppose you already know that just about everyone's take on it will be that it's just your imagination, unless you can show it's more than that.

I'm interested to know whether flaccon simply informed you she had listened to the recording and then you listened again and heard new stuff, or did she discuss what she thought she heard and then you began to hear it too?

Do you think that the recording has changed? Now that you hear sounds you didn't before, are those sounds consistent each time you play it, as if they had become part of the recording, or are they inconsistent - do you hear entirely different new sounds every time you listen?

May we hear the recording you think has changed?
 
Scrappy only has time for drive-by postings. He doesn't have time to acknowledge any of the numerous rational counter points to his claims, such as that he's recording ambient room sounds that the naked ear cannot detect, and then projecting his own biases into the playback as his brain seeks out patterns in the noise.

For example.
 
scrappy said:
Thank you for uploading these files. The first one was total silence. The 2nd one I listened into it carefully, several times. I listened to the hiss, in the hiss and behind the hiss. It was just a loud hiss. Since it went through flaccons PC, I can now hear things behind the hiss. I have made out a few words in certain places.
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Was this before or after flaccon told you the words to hear? In the unlikely event it was before, did you tell her? Did she hear the same words?

It's very important that you understand that unless you do a blind test with flaccon, all this means squat.
 
scrappy said:
Since it went through flaccons PC, I can now hear things behind the hiss. I have made out a few words in certain places. I wont mention the words to anyone yet. I can't get back online for a day or so, but would like to hear your take on it.
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The only thing that matters AT ALL is if you and flaccon can independently hear exactly the same words, in exactly the same order, across multiple samples of audio files that have "gone through" flaccon's PC.

For example, if you confirmed 10 different files unhaunted, then had the 10 played through the OP's computer, then had her write down the 10 different messages she heard, then had the files delivered to you in random order, then had you match each newly haunted message exactly to what flaccon claimed to hear... that would be very interesting.

You hearing or not hearing words embedded in ambient sound and electronic static is worthless.
 
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scrappy said:
...Thank you for uploading these files. The first one was total silence. The 2nd one I listened into it carefully, several times. I listened to the hiss, in the hiss and behind the hiss. It was just a loud hiss. Since it went through flaccons PC, I can now hear things behind the hiss. I have made out a few words in certain places. I wont mention the words to anyone yet. I can't get back online for a day or so, but would like to hear your take on it.
Click to expand...

Jack by the hedge said:
...I'm interested to know whether flaccon simply informed you she had listened to the recording and then you listened again and heard new stuff, or did she discuss what she thought she heard and then you began to hear it too?

Do you think that the recording has changed? Now that you hear sounds you didn't before, are those sounds consistent each time you play it, as if they had become part of the recording, or are they inconsistent - do you hear entirely different new sounds every time you listen?

May we hear the recording you think has changed?
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laca said:
Was this before or after flaccon told you the words to hear? In the unlikely event it was before, did you tell her? Did she hear the same words? ...
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I'd like to join the group which is asking about this, scrappy.
Did flaccon tell you what she claims to have heard on the recording before you heard it again, after she'd listened to it on her own computer?
 
What could happen, is for flaccon to send a PM to someone on the forum about what she thinks she hears, and for scrappy to do the same - with no contact between them on the subject. That person could then post the results here.
 
pakeha said:
I'd like to join the group which is asking about this, scrappy.
Did flaccon tell you what she claims to have heard on the recording before you heard it again, after she'd listened to it on her own computer?
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Can no one else hear anything? The idea of Caleb doing the recording and uploading it to box.com was so we could hear it first. Again I know what I heard "a constant hiss" no rumbles or interferences at all. definitely nothing that sounded like a voice.

Caleb uploaded to box.com. I made flacon aware and she told me to scrutinise every second. I listened into it several times (about 6 times) I let flacon hear it over the phone. I went back to it an hour later and still no change . I texted and asked had she listened in yet and she said no , not til after midnight to give other members a chance to listen in. It was the next night (after work) that I listened in again for any changes. I heard noises that were not present the night before, and I wrote down the words I'd heard and at what point I'd heard them. flacon told me not to tell her or anybody what I,ve heard for now, and I don't know what flacon herself has heard yet.
 
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