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LOU GENTILE, EVP Applicant

LordoftheLeftHand said:
The code man will be sent out of the room each time a recording is made. 20 separate recordings are made of the "answers", each of them on a separate piece of media (cassette or whatever, I’m not an audio guy). After each "answer" is recorded, the code man will enter the room, remove the media from the recorder and leave the room with it. In a separate room he will write the code word on the media.
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I wouldn't have him enter the room to collect the tape. I'd have it passed through a double door (akin to those used when you submit a urine specimen), so there's no contact at all between the two and no signals can be transferred.

A problem with having the claimant judge what is being said on the tape, though, is his transmitting sounds to it to he can clue in to what answer is being sought (*bump*pause*bump* is green, *bump*pause*pause*bump* is four, etc).
 
patchbunny said:
A problem with having the claimant judge what is being said on the tape, though, is his transmitting sounds to it to he can clue in to what answer is being sought (*bump*pause*bump* is green, *bump*pause*pause*bump* is four, etc).
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That is why you don't let him know the question that is being asked (properly blindfolded and being handed a sign or something similar). If he makes a noise during the first "answer" then later he can identify that recording as the first answer session, but he still won't know the question (kind of like a weird version of jeopardy!). Unless the spirits actually answer the questions.

LLH
 
I think KRAMER shoudl require it the test take place in the NSA building, so as to take place in a mesh shielded enclosure to filter out all radio waves, and further, require the power sources for all recorders be properly grounded and isolated.

That should be fun.
 
fowlsound said:
I think KRAMER shoudl require it the test take place in the NSA building, so as to take place in a mesh shielded enclosure to filter out all radio waves, and further, require the power sources for all recorders be properly grounded and isolated.

That should be fun.
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I think we should require all applicants to be properly grounded. Whoops, sorry, that will never happen.

IXP
 
So what's this all about then, a radio show host applying for the challenge? I think I've heard about mr. Gentile previously when reading bad astronomy pages, I think Phil has been featured in that show, or was it c2c, not sure, maybe both.

Anyways, do you think this will ever proceed to testing stage? I mean, if he takes the test and fails, it kind of might damage the show!
 
Mendeli said:
So what's this all about then, a radio show host applying for the challenge? I think I've heard about mr. Gentile previously when reading bad astronomy pages, I think Phil has been featured in that show, or was it c2c, not sure, maybe both.

Anyways, do you think this will ever proceed to testing stage? I mean, if he takes the test and fails, it kind of might damage the show!
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I believe you are correct. This will devolve into another Paul Carey situation, and Mr. Gentile will spend the rest of his life telling people how Randi was afraid to test him.
 
Would it work if you put the recorder in a faraday cage and a sound-proof room? That might eliminate all potential sources of fakery or interferance.
 
LordofTheLeftHand has already proposed a way to make all the faraday cage, x-ray, sound-proof, Panasonic engineer stuff unneeded.
 
CACTUSJACKmankin said:
How would you protect the test against this guy throwing his voice? Like a ventriloquist.
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The idea is to make it where he does not know the answer to the question he is asking. If this is the case he could make all the noise he wanted but it won't help him identify the answer.

LLH
 
Whenever I hear EVP (especially ones with descriptions of what is "said"): I listen to it all the way through without reading the description or caption, try to figure out what I think was said (usually nothing), then read the description or caption (my reaction is usually "WHAT???"), then listen to it again.
I have yet to hear what they think was said on the first listen, but often hear it on the second listen. This is how you can judge EVPs for yourself. It's just auditory pareidolia. Try it out with this guy's EVPs. They are nothing special.
 
IMO, the "voices" Lou is hearing is simply an artifact of how his recorder works. Notice that he is pretty specific about the model that he requires.

Apparently, the Panasonic RR-DR60 uses CELP (Code Excited Linear Prediction). CELP is a fairly common standard for speech coding, used by e.g. GSM (and probably other digital cell-phone standards), Speex (the speech codec), and other systems that need to store digital speech efficiently.

While I don't know all the details of how CELP works, it basically does something like this: When the audio is recorded, the input signal is divided into short segments (frames). For each frame, the encoder tries to recreate the sound wave of the frame using a synthesizer. The encoder outputs the set of synthesizer parameters that produce a synthesized sound that best matches the original sound. These synthesizer parameters are what is stored in the memory of the digital recorder. When the recorded speech is played back, the stored synthesizer parameters are used to synthesize sound, which hopefully will be resonably similar to the input.

The advantage of this method is that it makes it possible to reproduce intelligible speech at a very low bitrate. Also, since the coder usually is tuned to human speech, it can actually make the speech come out clearer and filter out background noise. That's why digital cell phones often can work resonably well in noisy environments.

One downside is that while the output might be intelligible, it can sound synthetic, and the voice might sound different from the original. Listen to the clips on the page CACTUSJACK linked. Lou's voice sounds almost like a synthesized voice (which it kind of is).

Also, if you try to record something other than human speech, it will likely be horribly mangled. The encoder will try to find the best match possible, and since it's only equiped to reliably reproduce human speech it's pretty likely that the output will sound a lot like human speech, no matter what the input sounds like.

Googling RR-DR60 and EVP suggests that that specific model is the tool of choice for EVPers. Probably because of it's ability to turn any noise into something vaguely human sounding.
 
My first thought about this was how strange it is to require a low-grade, low-quality recorder to achieve these effects when it is obviously preferable to get a clearer recording using high tech, high quality recorders. Why are the effects not found with a high quality recorder?

Maybe the test would be to record the same sound on two devices at once? One of his recorders, as well as a high end recording device.
 
Peachy said:
My first thought about this was how strange it is to require a low-grade, low-quality recorder to achieve these effects when it is obviously preferable to get a clearer recording using high tech, high quality recorders. Why are the effects not found with a high quality recorder?

Maybe the test would be to record the same sound on two devices at once? One of his recorders, as well as a high end recording device.
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Quite simply, the high quality stuff is better engineered against faulty grounding, cross modulation etc...

I pointed that out to an EVP believer once and they had the asenine response that this means cheaper equipment is easier for the spirit to manipulate. So apparently ghosts are not only afflicted with laryngitis (since the recordings are usually faint) they're not very good at getting their message across...

I am happy to offer up properly engineered high quality equipment that is properly grounded and shielded to record next to the crap recorder in this test.

Of course, I still insist both be inside a copper mesh enclosure so as to shield from radio waves...
 
Peachy said:
My first thought about this was how strange it is to require a low-grade, low-quality recorder to achieve these effects when it is obviously preferable to get a clearer recording using high tech, high quality recorders. Why are the effects not found with a high quality recorder?

Maybe the test would be to record the same sound on two devices at once? One of his recorders, as well as a high end recording device.
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It's the same for spotting UFOs...

Cheap, available-to-the-consumer video cameras, preferably ones without any sort of video stabilization cababilities, are the tool of choice for UFO spotters. The big, expensive and complex telescopes used by professional astronomers are absolutely useless for spotting the UFOs.

It's all about picking the right tool for the wrong job... or the wrong tool for the right job, as the case may be.
 
Psiload said:
It's the same for spotting UFOs...

Cheap, available-to-the-consumer video cameras, preferably ones without any sort of video stabilization cababilities, are the tool of choice for UFO spotters. The big, expensive and complex telescopes used by professional astronomers are absolutely useless for spotting the UFOs.

It's all about picking the right tool for the wrong job... or the wrong tool for the right job, as the case may be.
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When you factor in other aspects of physics, such as cross modulation of radio stations or faulty ground loops in equipment, you have a lot of people thinking they are listening to ghosts when in fact it is nothing more than a controlled misuse of electronics.
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Source.
 
This is a tough one to test. I assume the "responses" will not be loud clear voice, but something faint. So the test of success will require some judgment. But with recordings, espescially bad ones, it is easy to hear voices and words when your task is to listen for them--I hear a hiss, "I think I heard "six"! Because the tet would require judges, there would need to be a control test to determine whether the test results are significant.

If you had a recording studio available, this wouldn't be much trouble. Otherwise, if the applicant accepts having the questions recorded and then played, then it would not be too difficult.

Whatever the protocol, the applicant cannot be in the recording room when the "responses" are recorded, and the judgment of the results will have to be compared to a control recording to determine statistical variance. This is going to be tricky unless you get a recording studio where you can control communication from one room to another, start and stop recording, and replicate the recording exactly for a control test, and get a number of "judges" to get statistically significant results.
 
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