This week in guest lecture Joe Banks mentioned EVP—Electronic Voice Phenomena—which, I‘ve only seen from Annie’s work before. The idea is that you can sometimes capture ghost voices on audio recordings, like, actual voices that weren’t there when the recording was made.
What I found really interesting was how EVP isn’t just about ghosts. It’s also about how we listen, and how much we want to hear something. It reminded me a lot of how Annie’s practice explores how sound carries memory, presence, and absence. The voice becomes fragile, stretched, or filtered through other materials, until it’s barely recognizable.
This made me realize they both deal with a kind of haunted listening. Not necessarily spooky ghosts, but more like the feeling that something or someone is almost there. Or maybe used to be. There’s always a bit of uncertainty. And maybe that’s the point.
Joe said something like, listeners would restore completely distorted sounds to language, and this “groundless meaning” is precisely the core mechanism of EVP auditory hallucinations. It makes me wonder how much of what we hear is shaped by our consciousness. With EVP, maybe people aren’t hearing the dead—they’re just projecting. But even so, that act of listening-with-intent becomes meaningful in itself.