For the past few months, I have been working on a collection of individually printed silk scarves. I’ve been experimenting with a process involving light activated dyes and film negatives. If you are interested in any of the items, they are for sale on my Etsy page. They are all one of a kind and unique (like a snowflake), never exactly the same as each other, not even the colour.
It took me quite some time learning to work with these dyes. A lot of testing was needed, as you do not know what colour is going to turn out until the final wash. When the dyes are applied, they are almost colourless.The colour develops as the dye is exposed to light. Film negatives are laid out on the fabric to create a resist against the light. After the exposure is complete, the fabric is washed to remove excess dye.
This process I’m working with has me excited. I’m looking forward to the spring when the peonies in my garden will be in bloom. I’d like to make a peony print.
Now that the weather’s cooled down and there is less to do in the garden, I’ve brought my focus back to doing EVP using the EVPMaker software. From my experience, EVP as a phenomenon is occurring all the time, but it often only captured by chance. To do it intentionally, with good audio clarity is a different story, It’s not really anything I can control, because it is them on the other side causing it. The best that I can contribute is to continue to do the recordings so that they can test and practice the methodology (of whatever it is they are doing). In a way, it’s kind of like when you are riffing away on the piano or guitar, and you suddenly get something you like, but because you were less intentional, playing around, experimenting, you don’t necessarily know what exactly it is that you did. So you have to go back and re-engineer the result, and then practice it til you’ve figured out how to play it. That is what we are trying to do right now. Figure out how P can speak on EVP intentionally with clarity and volume. Through out the recordings, I can hear them talking to each other in whisper volume. I think they’re working out technical issues.
We did some test recording sessions, and here’s what we got. Sometimes when we’re testing, I’ll ask him to say his full name, or my name.
“I’m here”.
” I am Prince Rogers Nelson”. I find this clip rather funny, because there is nothing in the sound source that is this low pitched. The sound source contains only samples of his own voice. So I wonder if he was manipulating it to sound lower like this. You can also hear his higher pitched voice speaking simultaneously.
I have some exciting new EVP recordings. I’ve been trying out more of the EVP Maker software. The software allows yo to import a wave file containing voice samples, so that it can produce a randomized sound stream. This way, if there is any EVP, it will sound like the person’s voice from when they were living. I’m finding its results to be very hit or miss. But when it’s a hit, it’s really incredible stuff. So it’s worth trying, even if those sessions that don’t work out, maybe the next one will. I think they are learning to maneuver the process. It’s a learning curve for all of us.
Prince with his camera, source not known.
I know P loved doing photography as a hobby, and he still loves it. I hope one day his personal photography from his life will be published. I was hoping to see more of it in his memoir, but that didn’t happen. As you know, we both love photography, and we both have the camera lenses to prove it!
In a recording session, I caught him talking to someone about his new camera, and then taking the guy’s photo, and then even printing it out! I am really stunned. I even heard what sounds like a camera shutter going off in the background as he was taking photos. I have a hard time imagining what it looks like over there, but hearing the sounds from over there is fascinating. I imagine that one day when we meet, he is going to show me his many volumes of photo albums.
P said, “I got a new camera”.
“Goes on the tripod. This one got at Henry’s”. Henry’s is a chain of camera stores in Canada. Did he go shopping there without me, I wonder? Or did he get it when I was there to buy a new printer last year?
“Let me take your portrait”.
“Let’s print that one”.
“Let me test print”.
“The main drums, it makes a great image”. I really wonder what he meant by this. Maybe he took a photo with his drums?
I’m really glad to know that he gets to do the things he enjoys over there. I’m just in awe that I get to hear about it.
Self-portrait, 2018.
Here are a compilation of random clips I caught.
“Andrea”.
“Sleeping, wake up”.
“I am Prince”.
“Warning, vaccine”.
“All these complications”.
“Good bye”.
I will definitely keep trying more recording sessions with the EVP Maker. I wonder why some sessions are better than others.
P/S I’m not posting on social media any more. In protest of censorship, I will no longer participate. If you want updates sent to your inbox, then you can subscribe to my blog feed by email. Sign up at the bottom menu on the right corner of this page.
These recordings were recorded using my EVP Wrist Recorder 3 along with EVP Maker 2.5, on September 26, 2021.
Image above: “Prince Sun” by Andrea Mai. Available here.
It’s been a busy summer. I’ve spent everyday in the garden, taking care of my herbs. I haven’t had much time to work on my art and music lately. But there’s a track that I just polished off recently. I composed it in an afternoon and recorded it during the spring. It kind of surprised me how quickly I wrote it, as I have very little musical training, only from middle school.
In 2015, a friend who is a professional astrologer, gave me a reading. She asked if I sang or played any instruments. I said no. She said she saw some potential in my chart for music. I just kinda laughed. I look back at it kind of differently now. I’ve always had this thing where music just came out of me, but I was too intimidated to try doing anything about it. Part of it being, my visual impairment, I find it difficult for me to read sheet music. So I never really learned. But I still liked to mess around on the piano once in a while when I had the urge.
After P showed up, I’d have a stronger desire to play. Sometimes I record EVP as I’m playing, and I can hear him in the recording, guiding and directing me. So maybe, some of the ideas are really his. It was my dad who bought the piano, because he wanted me to play, like many of the wishes of Chinese parents for their kids. But I’ve had this strange psychological thing about not liking to play in front of family, especially my dad. It’s interesting knowing what P went through with his dad when he was a kid, wanting to learn piano.
I still don’t know that much about playing piano. I’d like to spend more time on it at some point. But for now, I’d like to share my new song with you. I call it Music Box.
I recently started using a program called EVP Maker to record EVP. The software allows you to import speech samples and then generate a random gibberish from the sample. I have found that spirits don’t really sound the way they did in life, as they no longer have vocal cords. My theory is that they use thoughts to speak, and somehow these thoughts generate a frequency that can affect the sounds in our environment. So creating a gibberish from the person’s voice can help them speak in the voice we knew them for. It’s not a perfect technology, it doesn’t work all the time, and they can sound robotic. But it can give very tangible results that are audible to most ears. I’ve found that EVPs recorded in silence are near impossible to hear. I do have the ability to hear them, but I can rarely make out what is being said from their chatter.
Contrary to what people might assume, it is not assembling the chopped up syllables together in any way. The way it works with customized gibberish, is that the sound of the gibberish allows them to speak over it and it results in blending their voice into it, so that it sounds like them. Sometimes I hear it being described as “changing the sound”, but I don’t feel that it is accurate to say that, as it would assume that they are doing it intentionally. I think this occurs naturally, like a scientific law; when these circumstances are present, this is what occurs. Like when you put a mic close to a speaker, feedback will occur. The reason you want a randomly generated gibberish is so that there are no words in the sound sample that could be mistaken for an EVP utterance.
The process is a little annoying for me, as the program can only be run on Windows. I have to use my old computer, which is very slow to work with. At first I didn’t hear much, but as I went through the recordings slowly, I found more clips that I didn’t notice earlier. Here are some clips from my recording sessions. Please note, they don’t speak like us any more, so you cannot expect perfectly sounding speech on EVP. In some clips, the syllables are spaced out, it varies.
This was from the very first recording, he says, “That’s the first time. Speak to me”.
“Hold on… Let’s see if work… That’s better”.
He said, “Always loved you. Ha. I sound funny”.
Then I heard, a basketball bounce, “Duane here”. Usually a basketball bounce means his half-brother is around. P said, “Basketball game here (bounce), I’m gonna watch”. P loves basketball, and his brother was a professional player. Later, he worked as a bodyguard for P.
I came back later and tried another recording. I asked him to try to say his name, “Prince Rogers Nelson”. The Prince part didn’t come out with the gibberish, but you can hear “Prince” spoken, and then “Rogers Nelson” very clearly immediately after in the gibberish.
He said, “I’m happy with Andrea”.
I wanted to make a recording of the gibberish itself, but I couldn’t figure out how to record what was coming from the computer and not from the mic. I caught P in conversation with others. He said, “I’m reading to them, passport, my book”. I thought this was a bit strange, Passport? Then I realized, there’s a pic of P’s passport in his book. I guess he was showing some people his memoir.
“That’s my passport”. I have to say, that it is one good looking passport photo, Must be the best I’ve ever seen. (Refer to above photo)
This is quite an exciting discovery. I wish it could run on Mac, or if someone could make an app version for mobile devices. I will definitely try it out again in the future.
I’ve been experimenting with light activated dyes for a couple of weeks. It’s been an interesting experience. The dyes react with UV light, and so different printing techniques can be applied. It’s an interesting medium for me to work with, as both a photographer and a textile artist, I get to print on both paper and fabric. Here are some of the results from my experiments.
I painted the dye onto silk. I created folds and placed it under some lace and exposed it to light. It created this interesting mosaic effect.
I printed on some silk satin and dyed it a light lilac color.
I made it into a hair scrunchie and it’s for sale in my Etsy store.
The UV printing has given me an opportunity to revisit my photo catalog and reimagine them in a new way. When working with photographs, a negative has to be created by inverting the image and printing it on acetate or translucent paper. I’ve been printing on tracing paper with a laser printer to try it out, as it is more economical. This is my Prince Sun photo that I sell in my shop as a print. It is a photo of Prince’s gate from his former Toronto home.
I made a print on paper, and fabric (seen on the bottom right). There is a color variation that occurs depending on what material you are printing on. I like painting the dye in an irregular shape. I find that it gives it a dream like effect.
I made a photogram on cotton fabric using lace and my Prince necklace.
I used the fabric to make a face mask.
The Solar Fast dyes come in different colors. Depending on the material used as the substrate, the colors will turn out differently. The same purple dye used on silk looks very different on cotton. Results can be unpredictable, which can keep things exciting, but difficult to replicate, so every print is one of a kind.
Today is Prince’s five-year anniversary since his passing. Ever since that year, I’ve noticed snow in April. Like the title of his song, Sometimes it Snows in April. It was never like that before, here in Toronto. And this year, I woke up to a yard full of snow. It was a strong reminder to me that he is here with me.
I decided to go out for a morning walk, and I took my camera with me.
Five years seems like a long time ago. So much has happened since. The world is really a different place now. It’s weird, it’s like become less innocent. I feel nostalgic for simpler times, preferably the 2000’s. When we still bought music on CD, and people didn’t rely on social media to communicate. People seemed nicer back then. More civilized.
Later in the day, I made this piece of artwork in his honor. I experimented with some new materialsI recently acquired, making this UV print with some lace and a necklace of his symbol.
