Uncanny Atlas
Tool

Instrumental transcommunication (ITC)

A practice, covering EVP and several kinds of device, in which people try to receive messages from the dead through electronic equipment.

What users say it does
Wikipedia says the term covers contact between the living and spirits or other discarnate beings through any electronic device, from tape recorders to fax machines, televisions and computers. Imants Barušs notes that voices, images and text have been claimed through telephones, TV sets and computers.
What it measures
The EVP method, Barušs says, usually meant tuning a radio between stations and taping the output. James Alcock, writing in Skeptical Inquirer in 2004, says listeners who have been told what a voice says tend to hear those words in random noise.

Ernst Senkowski coined the term in the 1970s, Wikipedia says, as a wider name for contact through electronic equipment. Its roots are in EVP. The Encyclopedia of Occultism and Parapsychology says Friedrich Jürgenson recorded a finch's song in July 1959, heard what seemed a human voice on playback, and later heard what seemed a message from his dead mother. Jürgenson's book deeply affected Konstantin Raudive, a Latvian psychologist. Wikipedia describes an ITC claim in which Jürgenson's image was said to appear on a colleague's television, tuned to an empty channel, on the day of his funeral.

Barušs, in a 2001 Journal of Scientific Exploration paper titled Failure to Replicate Electronic Voice Phenomenon, notes that EVP has little documentation in mainstream scientific journals. Luka Bekavac, in Supernatural Studies, treats ITC as a common cultural way of representing the afterlife.

Sources