'Breakthrough: An Amazing Experiment in Electronic Communication with the Dead' by Konstantin Raudive
An extract from experimental scientist Konstantin Raudive's book Breakthrough (1971), which explores the phenomenon of voices of dead persons who appear during playbacks of tape recordings.
Although we are far from grasping the full complexities of the phenomenon as yet, the so-called ‘voices from beyond' are easily distinguishable from terrestrial human voices. They speak in an unmistakable rhythm and usually employ several languages in a single sentence; the sentence construction obeys rules that differ radically from those of ordinary speech and, although the voices seem to speak in the same way as we do, the anatomy of their ‘speech-apparatus' must be different from our own. [...] Examination of our human speech-mechanism has shown that the whole process of ‘speaking' is a very complicated one; vocal chords, glottis and lungs all play their part. In producing the sound of a voice, the vocal chords are brought together by a system of rotatory cartilages and a complicated interaction of small muscles; air, being pressed out of the lungs, causes the vocal chords to vibrate, and the size and tension of the chords determine the frequency of this vibration. The movement of the vocal chords influences the stream of air and this, in turn, sets off the resonance-frequencies in the oral cavity. The timbre of a voice depends largely on the shape of the mouth. Voices are usually unique and everybody possesses, so to speak, his or her own voice, distinguished by its special, unmistakable tone-quality. [...]
Let us ask ourselves briefly an important question: does a thought consist of words? The answer is: no. Thoughts consist of psychic particles that stand in the same relation to reality as words. As we all know, there are many forms of language: the language of the battlefield, the language of reports, the language of everyday life, an ex-cathedra-language, and so forth. This means that to think of a language form is to think of a form of life.
Excerpts from Konstantin Raudive, Breakthrough: An Amazing Experiment in Electronic Communication with the Dead, Chapter 1, 5, ‘The Language of the Voices and How They Speak', Colin Smythe Limited, 1971
Reprinted with permission from Colin Smythe Limited