Evp Pioneer: Konstantīns Raudive

16th October 2021. Reading Time: 6 minutes EVP, Famous Paranormal Cases, General. 1703 page views. 0 comments.

While many credit Friedrich Jürgenson with the ‘discovery’ of EVP, it was Konstantīns Raudive that brought it into the mainstream attention of the world with his groundbreaking book “‘Breakthrough an Amazing Experiment In Electronic Communication With The Dead” Konstantīns Raudive (1971).

While many credit Friedrich Jürgenson with the ‘discovery’ of EVP, it was Konstantīns Raudive that brought it into the mainstream attention of the world with his groundbreaking book “‘Breakthrough an Amazing Experiment In Electronic Communication With The Dead” Konstantīns Raudive (1971). In fact, much of what we know about EVP today such as the class system is from the research of Raudive!

To read about Friedrich Jürgenson and his work with EVP check out my article: Friedrich Jürgenson - EVP Pioneer and The Jürgenson Frequency

Image Source: Breakthrough an Amazing Experiment In Electronic Communication With The Dead Konstantīns Raudive (1971)

In 1964, Raudive a Latvian writer picked up a copy of “Voices from space” by Friedrich Jürgenson (1964) and became inspired. He personally contacted Jürgenson and arranged to meet in person so that he could learn his methods first hand. After listening to Jürgenson’s recordings, Raudive was convinced this phenomenon to be real. Thanks to his intellectual background, Raudive identified that the voices coming through, were indeed spoken in different languages including German, Latvian & French.

“In the beginning our recordings produced unclear, hardly discernible voices; not before 10th June at 9:30pm., did we achieve good results. This successful recording was made through radio. I have played it over to many people since, and all have heard and understood the voices it contains. First a voice calls: “Friedrich, Friedrich:” - then a woman’s voice says softly “Heute pa nakti” (German and Latvian: Tonight) followed by a woman’s voice asking “Kennt ihr Margaret, Konstantin?” (German: “Do you know Margaret Konstantin?”); the voice continues in a singing tone: “Vi talu! Runa!” (Latvian:”We are far away! Speak!”). The fragment closes with a female voice: “Va a dormir! Margarete!” (French:”Go to sleep! Margarete!”)

These words made a deep impression on me, as Margarete Petrautzki had died recently, and her illness and death had greatly affected me. This coincidence gave me much food for thought and I resolved to investigate the phenomenon by myself; to isolate it, if possible from Jürgenson’s personality as a medium and to make it “independent”. Was the phenomenon really universal and free from all subjective influence? In that case it should be able to manifest itself on tape quite independently, regardless of persons, time or space. Should this prove to be so, one would have to reckon with an objective existence of this phenomenon. If I were able to succeed in becoming aware of the phenomenon through my own individual research, I would try to understand its working and penetrate its meaning.

So I started my own experiments in June 1965. In the course of five years I have made so many observations and gained so much experience that my main task now lies in sifting the enormous amount of voice-material collected on my tapes; in crystallising the essential criteria common to all possible forms of manifestation heard, and in discarding all details not essential to a thorough comprehension of the phenomenon.”
Breakthrough an Amazing Experiment In Electronic Communication With The Dead” Konstantīns Raudive (1971).

His book focused on what were dubbed by many as ‘Raudive voices’. When working in obtaining his said to be close to 70,000 voices, he claimed that people needed a trained ear to identify the voices which would take a person around 3 months in training to adjust to the range of frequency spoken by the voices. In order to make a voice more audible, once a sentence that he could understand was located, he would then record this section of the original tape onto another tape, repeating the process 4 times. This way he was able to study every phoneme of the voice and able to verify it with a degree of certainty. Raudive faced a lot of criticism for the lack of controls implemented during sessions lamenting that the voice on the recording is more important than its origin and he trusted that people who were in attendance during recordings were sincere and honest during recording sessions. For this and his work with radio waves which is often linked to auditory hallucinations (which Raudive himself admits), he was still brazenly confident that the evidence spoke for itself.

“The fact that the voices are audible to our ear and we can understand that speech, confirms that they exist physically and independently from us, and the experiments prove that the voices can be heard by anybody with a fair sense of hearing, regardless of his or her personal views, sympathy or antipathy. The voices are objective entities that can be verified and examined under psycho-acoustic, physical conditions. This concurrence of psycho-acoustic and paranormal data can hardly be brushed aside as mere coincidence; the voices must therefore be deemed to stem from a different plane of existence than our own.”
Breakthrough an Amazing Experiment In Electronic Communication With The Dead” Konstantīns Raudive (1971).

Raudive himself claimed that after 6 months of working with radio recordings that his own version of Jürgenson’s mediator came through to assist with his sessions and tell him when he should hit record. Between the years of 1966 and 1968, there were a series of listening tests conducted with 400 participants observing his sessions but not participating in the communication side. There were said to be between 150-200 voices per test with the majority in the Class A category. This eventually led to the publication of his book “Breakthrough an Amazing Experiment In Electronic Communication With The Dead” Konstantīns Raudive (1971) which also published the ‘Class System’ still used by the majority of paranormal investigators decades later.

• Group “A” consists of voices that can be heard and identified by anyone with normal hearing and knowledge of the language spoken; no special training of the ear is needed to detect them.

• Group “B” consists of voices that speak more rapidly and more softly, but are still quite plainly audible to a trained and attentive ear. The ability to differentiate increases with practice, but this is a slow and wearisome process. For this reason it is difficult to use non-regular participants for experimental purposes with group “B” voices.

• Group “C” consists of the most interest voices; voices that give us a great deal of information and much paranormal data. Unfortunately, these can be heard only in fragments, even by a trained ear, but with improved technical aids, it may eventually become possible to hear and demonstrate these voices, which lie beyond our range of hearing, without trouble.

Breakthrough an Amazing Experiment In Electronic Communication With The Dead” Konstantīns Raudive (1971).

While the voices captured on recordings were called ‘Raudive voices’, they would soon be replaced by a more familiar term, EVP. While it wasn’t Raudive who coined this term, he did inspire it. The actual term EVP would later appear in “Voices from the tapes: recordings from the other world” by Peter Bander (1973) which drew heavily from Raudive’s work.

As we learnt above, Raudive initially decided to start his own research to see if the phenomenon could exist beyond it being linked to just one person. I think it is safe to say that he found his answers in that respect and so much more!

Breakthrough an Amazing Experiment In Electronic Communication With The Dead” Konstantīns Raudive (1971) is available to read for free via public domain.

For a comprehensive look at EVP, check out the LLIFS Guide to EVP available on paperwork Worldwide via Amazon, Book Depository and direct from LLIFS. Also on kindle! https://llifs.com.au/shop/books/the-llifs-guide-to-evp-ebook/

References:

Breakthrough an Amazing Experiment In Electronic Communication With The Dead” Konstantīns Raudive (1971).

“Voices from the tapes: recordings from the other world” by Peter Bander (1973)

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