White Noise

White Noise

A sample file of WHITE NOISE can be downloaded from The Unknown Truth

- With the blockbuster movie that came out in January of 2005, the term white noise was viewed in a different light from what paranormal investigators actually use it for. White noise, to a paranormal investigator, is a type of sound that is produced by combining a lot of different frequencies together. If you took all of the imaginable tones that a human can hear and combined them together, you would have white noise.

- The description “white” describes this type of noise in the same way it describes white light. The word “white” is used because the color white is created when all the colors in the light spectrum combine. A prism can be used to separate white light back into its component colors. White noise (also called white sound) is a combination of equal amounts of different frequencies of sound, just like white light is a combination of colors. You can think of white noise as 20,000 tones all playing at the same time and at the same level.

- Because white noise contains so many frequencies, it is often used to mask other sounds. If you are in a motel and voices from the room next-door are leaking into your room, you might turn on the fan to drown out the voices. The fan produces a good approximation of white noise. Why does that work? Why does white noise drown out voices?

- An example of how white noise works with the brain is this: Say you just parked your car at a mall with your two friends in the back seat and your cell phone rings. You pick it up and start talking. While you are talking to the person on the phone one of your friends in the car starts asking you a question. Normally you would either stop listening to the person on the phone for a minute, or you would hold up your hand and ask the person in the car to wait. Why do we do this? It is because the human brain can actually only listen, process and understand one voice at a time. If you were to stay on the hypothetical phone and two others in the car start talking to each other, you would “hear” them all, but you could only listen to one at a time. Now if we were to step this up to explaining white noise, let’s have the three people in the car walk into the mall. You are still on your cell phone and the other two are still talking. But as you enter the mall even they tend to be drowned out. There are simply too many people talking at once. Even if you were to get off of the phone and just sit in say…the food court of the mall. All the noise is hitting you, but you can only pick out one conversation to listen to at a time. When we go back to the motel scenario we can now understand why the fan drowns out the voices coming through the wall. The fan would be the mall noise, while the voices next door would be the two other people in the car as you enter the mall. They are simply lost in the other noise.

- White noise is controversially thought to attract spirits. I say controversially, because it totally depends on which investigator you talk to about it, for what their view is on the subject. Some do not choose to use white noise due to the background it creates for the recording or they think that it masks over the actual E.V.P. Others swear by it, while still others only use it sometimes. For the same reason some dislike the use of white noise, others like it. That being that one of the positive things when using white noise is that it gives you a constant background noise. This helps to make your recording more credible if you do capture an E.V.P., as it makes it harder to fake one while keeping the background noise unbroken. But I’m getting ahead of myself now. I’m sure your wondering how white noise is used and why. Right? Well, this is where fact of what it is starts to blur with why it is used, as white noise in relation to the paranormal is all theory. Just like everything else in the paranormal field is.

- White noise is used as a “base” for recording during E.V.P. sessions. When it is used it should be played at a very low “hum” in the background. One of the leading theories in relation to the use of white noise is that it “attracts” spirits, therefore getting more E.V.P.’s. I have heard of more than one person/group who has tried this and then swears they will never go without it. You may also want to play this in the background while you conduct your investigations. Some feel this helps keep the spirit interested as well as makes it easier for them to communicate with you. I recommend you experiment with this process and try different approaches. Find what works for you. - You can either purchase a White Noise CD or you can make your own by simply downloading a tone generator. There is also one available through Haunted Voices Investigations. One good one is the E.V.P. maker or the NCH tone generator (both are listed in the download section of www.hvrnc.com) and recording the sound to a disk yourself.