Otherworld North East Research Society Journal 01 | Page 33

Journal 2007

lets face it, most people simply don't have access to such facilities! Having your own
sound-proof room for such research would be ideal for such experiments!
Some people claim that by interacting with their Dictaphones in such a way that they
“talk” to the “spirits” they are trying to communicate with can aid. Again though, I have
never found there to be any correlation of results between recordings taken whilst talking
or not. It is always something worth trying though! Examples of things people often try
are asking a series of questions whilst recording, such things as “are you male?”, “are you
happy?”, etc. are just some examples of what people commonly ask. Generally a brief
pause of maybe 30 seconds or so after each question is asked is used to enable to “spirits”
time to reply to each question.
Some flaws in this aspect of recordings can be that if you do happen to record something
you are convinced isn’t from a living human being, if you and/or some team members are
in the vicinity of the dictaphone then how many other people will believe you when you
claim a voice you recorded isn’t simply one of your team members’? This is just something
else to bear in mind.
Downloading the Data and Analysis of Results
This obviously only applies to digital dictaphones as about the only easy method of
analysis you can do on an analogue dictaphone is simply to listen to the recording(s). You
can of course clean up the recording if you have the relevant equipment to do so but most
people don't have such a thing and indeed, you don't always need one. It can be useful to
clean up the sound recording but it is only really necessary in my mind to do this if you
have used some form of background noise (e.g. the white noise I mentioned earlier). In
my opinion, if you need to fiddle around with your recording by cleaning it up, speeding
the recording up, slowing it down or indeed playing it backwards in order to hear
something, the less likely it is to being anything paranormal!
You can of course transfer your analogue recordings onto your computer using a cable
linkup but this in itself can cause more problems through possible degrading of the sound
files through transfer. It is imperative that you ALWAYS keep the original tape as having
just a recording left on your computer will almost inevitably invalidate any results you may
have achieved.
You almost always get some software with any digital dictaphone bought new but the
software usually allows you to do nothing more than simply extract the files and save
them to your computer.
You can buy a whole range of sound analysis software or you could do my old faithful trick
and just download the free versions from the Internet as I find they were just as useful as
anything I could've bought within my own budget. Of course, if you have the cash to
splash you could go crazy and get yourself hundreds of pounds worth of software but
remember you'll be lucky to record anything beyond potentially/vaguely/possibly/maybe

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