What would be the value of using a microphone array (multiple mics)?

[Michael Lee]

One technology that the commercial space has been exploring is microphone arrays for smart devices like the Amazon Echo. The idea is that multiple microphones better cancel out environmental noise and reverberation leading to a clearer voice for speech recognition.

What would be the benefit for ITC? Localized spirit voices? Improved signal-to-noise? It's not easy to make a microphone array, so the argument for pursuing this would have to be compelling.

BTW, I have played with two microphone setups. This is easy to do and does help with sound cancellation if there is a localized audio source.

 

[Dr Jeffers]

Ive experimented with multiple mics Michael, and they do add ability to focus on localised areas / help with sound reduction (in a traditional sense). There is a distinct difference however between normal acoustic sound pickup and the capture of evp, in that whatever sounds are captured for evp purposes IS the actual resource (building material) from which an evp is created from. Hissing sounds create hissing voices, mechanical sounds create mechanical voices, and so on. There are exceptions to this, but as a general rule, this is the case for most evps. I have proved this to myself over the (hmmm) 34 years I have been involved in evp (yes, Im showing my age here). So, in a lot of instances, the poorest mics sometimes pick up the best evp, probably due to their limited bandwidth - basically covering the speech band and not much else. But I'm not saying that extended bandwidth is useless - quite the contrary, as another vital aspect of evp reception (in addition to the collection of raw material) is catalytic activity, and this can come indirectly from the dynamic range of the audio source itself, or from environmental acoustic triggers such as clicks, cracks  and other transients picked up acoustically (or introduced by noisy or interference prone internal audio circuitry).

In relation to the concept of localised spirit voices, I do not think such a thing exists, so no directional mic can be of use except in picking up the best source of raw material and catalytic content (which can be interpreted as being in a particular direction or localised).

In my experience, an evp voice (before manifestation) is in the first and most primal instance  a "spirit's thought" (which cannot move a microphone diaphragm) that gains ability to interact with our 3D world (push it about) through the agency of our multidimensional bodies, that have ability to subtly receive and translate the thought down to what I would call a bio-plasmic or bio-gravitational field, as I have mentioned in one of my other posts. Some people are good evp operators due to this process working better for them, and other people have no success with evp, so it could be said that a degree of what Id loosely call unconscious mediumship is necessary for an operator to receive good evp using traditional methods.

There is lots to talk about here, but I'll halt for now.

JEFF

[Michael Lee]

Jeff, 

Although a little off topic from the original question, I agree with your understanding that spirits utilize the sounds available to them. This can actually be stated mathematically as convolution: roughly speaking they can slightly change the volume of the individual frequency components of environmental sound. 

I recently experimented with two microphones and several projected sounds (testing one at a time) from a speaker. Then using microphone cancellation and machine learning to disentangle the original voice.

I like to think of the played sound as having two functions: 1) provide a fixed sound field that we can accurately and mathematically (digitally) remove from the recording. 2) energy for spirits to manipulate, like your thoughts suggest and my convolution theory.

I agree with you that locality may not be all that necessary for spirits. Ill tell you though, it would help with isolating out the sound pollution in my household.

 

[Fernando Luis Cacciola Carballal]

4 hours ago, Dr Jeffers said:

In my experience, an evp voice (before manifestation) is in the first and most primal instance  a "spirit's thought" (which cannot move a microphone diaphragm) that gains ability to interact with our 3D world (push it about) through the agency of our multidimensional bodies, that have ability to subtly receive and translate the thought down to what I would call a bio-plasmic or bio-gravitational field, as I have mentioned in one of my other posts.

I already mentioned that I very much agree with that statement, but now I would like to direct you to this post which I think contains some details about why that might be the case:
 

 

[Dr Jeffers]

Michael, do you have a sound clip you could post please of disentangled voices that you recovered using machine learning?
JEFF

[Michael Lee]

Here's some "greatest hits" from the last year :

youre_getting_good_voice_now.wavtotally_fine_with_us.wavsuch_a_great_signal.wavthis_is_so_exciting.wavisnt_portal_so_fun.wavstop_mixing_it_directly.wav

[Dr Jeffers]

Thanks Michael, great clips, and clear. What is the process of disentangling the voices from the residual noise?

[Michael Lee]

The general method is to figure out how a spirit voice is corrupted when we hear it directly from our noise-generating devices and then train a machine learning model to reverse the effect. Specifically, I have found at least three corruption processes:

(1) the spirit signal is often heavily buried in noise (i.e. additive noise).

2) the spirit signal is "quantized" or in other words it sounds like it's (e.g.) 2 to 4-bit audio vs. clean 16-bit audio.

3) the signal is "sparse" or missing a lot in time - instead of hearing a smooth waveform, we are randomly getting 10-20% of the time samples, instead of all 100% of the samples.

So, what you do, is you train a machine learning to convert clean English speech corrupted by these three processes (or others) back into uncorrupted clean speech. Then apply this trained model on your favorite noise ITC signal.

It's been a struggle because I think these 3 processes together (and others we don't know about) are just too destructive on the original audio that spirits are trying to convey. In other words, we lose too much information to restore back to intelligible speech. We are always on the lookout for more spirit-sensitive hardware.

 

 

[Dr Jeffers]

Thanks Michael, I will have to ponder this.

JEFF

[Michael Lee]

Jeff, I should point out that spirits don't have to share their voice directly - they are also capable of activating phonemes or even converting their voice into frequency space. What they are limited to, however, it appears to me, is spikes of energy, at least with the hardware we have given them.

[Dr Jeffers]

Michael, I agree with what you are saying. In my experimental work, the common phenomena I was seeing was the metamorphosis of voice content into messages using the vocal spectra that was available at the time. Radio sweep could do this quite well, but suffered a bad reputation as being only fragments of radio announcer's audio, which did happen unfortunately of course if the segment time was too long. I did some work on incremented step waveforms to drive the voltage tuning more efficiently, and this did improve the process. In the waveform, I basically skipped blank or poor reception areas of the band, and carefully set periods of directly on-station time, with intervening periods of muting (an analog version of your noise gater). This avoided the haphazard landing and leaving stations that does plague most radios when used for sweep, and subsequently the unwanted variations in segment lengths (towards longer ones) that were produced. It also added much more dynamism to the segments, and it is this which I consider as one of the magic ingredients that act as the catalyst for the metamorphosis. The main problem of radio sweep is of course the live nature of radio and the announcer's voice, and this is the pitfall that needs to be replaced / superseded by replacing live radio with synthesized voice artifacts or highly scrambled voice content.

Edited January 17, 2021 by Dr Jeffers