On the Road is a weekday feature spotlighting reader photo submissions.
From the exotic to the familiar, whether you’re traveling or in your own backyard, we would love to see the world through your eyes.
ema
It’s a crisp spring Saturday morning in the city. I plan to film in Central Park, end the video by The Met, then pop in for a quick visit. Done and done, and I have a great time. Now I’m back home and back to work. I’m editing the park video, so first time I’m reviewing what I filmed (iPhone 12) and recorded (binaural Sennheiser AMBEO Smart Headset mic). The video looks and sounds good, I’m almost at the end, walking toward the museum’s entrance.
And that’s when I hear it! (37s YT clip) A voice from beyond reaching out to me, twice, at 10:30 AM in the morning, on 5th Ave., on a Saturday. I rewind and listen to it again, and again, and again. I think it says “You’re So Pretty” and “Chris.” Note, I didn’t hear this when it happened, only once I was editing.
Now, while I do appreciate the beyond speaking English and being complimentary (because who doesn’t love comments on their appearance from a perfect, albeit disembodied, stranger?) the whole thing is a bit spooky. So, what do you think, a voice from beyond or mic distortion?
Here is some lovely Greek, Roman, and Egyptian art from The Met while you ponder my paranormal adventure.
OzarkHillbilly
Cool stuff.
As the voice, to me it sounds like a distorted echo of indeterminate origin.
eclare
I think, enjoy the fountain?
Eyeroller
There was a lot of background noise and opportunities for echoes. I hear what you’re talking about, especially “You’re So Pretty” (“Chris” sounded indistinct to me), but I think it’s an example of pareidolia, finding patterns where there are none. It’s particularly strong for seeing faces. I’ve seen examples where I know perfectly well that something isn’t a face and still find it difficult or impossible not to see that face.
prostratedragon
Manhattan is haunted.
Baud
Is your real name Chris and are you pretty?
PJ
I’m in the distorted sound that can be interpreted as language camp. My best guess is that it was a sound made by the bus or a passing vehicle. Is it more distinct if you mute one of the sides of the stereo output?
ema
Here is a 27s short with the unprocessed audio.
PJ
Also, the same sound seems to occur more faintly at appx 24:59-25:00.
ema
@Baud:
Absolutely! The beyond is never wrong.
ema
@PJ:
Is it more distinct if you mute one of the sides of the stereo output?
I don’t know how to do that. My entire audio editing is based on having watched a “How to Edit Audio In FinalCut Pro” YT video, and consists of adding a MultiMeter and Limiter to the track and making sure the values are -16 and -1.5.
Baud
@ema:
Your photos of the art are very nice BTW.
Geo Wilcox
That second picture reminds me of Phil Spector.
SiubhanDuinne
@Geo Wilcox:
Don’t you mean . . . Phil SPECTRE ???
Betty
Unnerving, whatever it is. Who knows what’s possible and beyond our understanding?
Yutsano
“There are more things in Heaven and Earth than dreamt of in your philosophy Horatio.”
Some guy named Bill wrote that that.
PJ
@ema: There should be a button to mute each audio channel in your editing software.
Also, it sounds like you are recording audio to a video app included with your phone (like Apple’s Camera app). This app has automatic audio compression applied. (There’s no way to turn this off, as far as I know, but you could get a dedicated video recording app that allows you to control audio recording.) This pushes all the sounds – quiet and loud – into a narrower dynamic range, so that loud sounds are not startling, but if there is no talking close to the microphone, it means that street noise gets elevated and loud sounds get relatively quieter. This can cause a subtle distortion to louder sounds. It also means that you don’t need to apply a limiter afterward (since it’s already been limited), just set the volume so it’s not peaking close to the red when you edit.
ema
@Baud:
Thank you.
ema
@PJ:
I plug the mic in the iPhone (the mic is a headset because it’s binaural) and I record using the phone’s camera. No fancy app.
SiubhanDuinne
I heard “Chris” very clearly. Had to listen a couple of times for “You’re so pretty.”
Um … have you ever seen Midnight Lace?
dnfree
We just took a trip and asked someone else to take a photo of us together by a statue of Dante. (Guess what country we were in.) The phone was an iPhone 13. An ambulance went by in the distance during the photo, and you can hear both the siren and the person taking the photo saying “There’s an ambulance!” It’s eerie, and why would there be sound recorded with a photo? It’s not a video!
Nancy
I think that the universe was acknowledging deep truth. You are pretty and in another life you may have been named Chris, known someone named Chris wished you were named Chris, wished you knew someone. . . . Messages from beyond are sadly nonspecific.
William Gibson’s Pattern Recognition has characters who discern much less clear messages out of recorded static. The characters went to specific important places in hopes of finding messages from the recently tragically dead.
It seemed delusional in the book and the main character struggled to accept her mother’s need to believe.
Somehow your story is not ridiculous and I like the art photos.
PJ
@ema: That’s what I thought; this is why it sounds the way it does.
opiejeanne
I can’t listen to it yet, too early to wake up everyone else, but isn’t there a colony of escaped parrots living in New York? Because “you’re so pretty” is a phrase that sounds like something a parrot would hear and repeat.
CaseyL
@opiejeanne:
There are flocks of feral parrots in Florida, for sure, but I didn’t know there were any in NYC. Seems like an awful environment for them.
But I do like your theory!
My own theory, and it isn’t much of one, is the mic just picked up a random bit of conversation from some other frequency.
Remember when we all used land lines, and sometimes conversation from other people on their phone calls would bleed in? Ranging from indistinct to so clear you could follow every word?
Even though cell phones are an entirely different technology, there is so much “signal” shooting through the bands at any given time it seems possible for that old phenomenon to happen – in fact, now that I think about it, I’;m surprised it doesn’t happen more often!
Miss Bianca
Well, that *is* spooky!
And damn, do I need to get back to the Met and check out their classical art section again!
munira
I think it’s spooky and most definitely from an alien or some paranormal being – lol.
MattF
I always have a moment of confusion when people talk about ‘The Met’. “Oh, wait— they mean the Museum, not the Opera.”
SW
Aliens. It’s always aliens.
Brachiator
Great examples of art. Might be time to visit New York again.
No such thing as paranormal.
JAM
@opiejeanne: Its funny you say that because I thought it sounded sort of like a parrot.
I also wonder if it was possible to pick up voices from the cars passing by, whether speakers or their radios?
PJ
@CaseyL:
There are parrots in Brooklyn and, I believe, in Queens. Supposedly they escaped from JFK. None in Manhattan, as far as I know. https://brooklynparrots.com/the-wild-brooklyn-parrot-faq/
Redshift
Nice photos! Great composition. (I should really learn to do that.)
BigJimSlade
@Eyeroller: Regarding pareidolia, in one of our bathrooms the fan is pretty loud, so it pumps out a lot of white noise. Sometimes if I’m spacing out for a minute, I think I can hear an old radio playing a rock radio station from like the 70s in a room on the other side of the wall. (There’s no room on the other side of the wall, it’s just the stairwell down into the garage.) Once I notice it’s happening, it’s kinda fun.
Dan B
Fantastic photos! You capture wonderful depth of field. And the art is mind boggling.
Maxim
This may be pattern recognition in the opposite direction, but I noticed that immediately after the first sound there’s the squeak of a brake that sounds like a transit bus, and my brain decided that the “voice” most resembles some sort of engine or transmission sound from such a bus, like it was shifting gears just before braking, maybe.
ema
@Nancy:
Thank you.
ema
@SW:
Obviously!
ema
@Redshift:
Thank you, I’m still learning.
ema
@Dan B:
Thank you!