The Work of The Forensic Phonetician

The Work of The Forensic Phonetician and The
Document Examiner
The forensic phonetician is concerned with all aspects of speech as evidence. This ranges from the
creation of accurate transcriptions of what was said, through deriving information about a speaker’s social
and regional background, to expressing an opinion on whether the speaker in two or more separate tape-
recordings is the same.
In addition, they help to design and interpret voice lineups, which allow victims and witnesses to express
an opinion as to whether the voice of a suspect is that of the criminal.
Transcription
Many court cases involve the presentation of transcriptions of tape-recorded evidence. The tape-
recording(s) concerned may be of people talking about future or past criminal activity or of them actually
committing a crime, as in the case of bomb threats, obscene phone calls, ransom demands, hoax
emergency calls or negotiating the buying or selling of drugs.
Very few of the transcriptions presented in court have been made by someone with a qualification in
phonetics, although occasionally a forensic phonetician is called in, typically when there is a dispute over
a small number of specific items, which could be single words or even an isolated phoneme. Sometimes
the transcription problem is not phonologically difficult, and the original mis-transcription has resulted
from the original transcriber hearing what they expected rather than what was actually said.
A Brief Digression on The Acoustic Analysis of Speech

Acoustically, speech is a very complex and constantly changing combination of multiple and
simultaneously produced noises and musical notes or frequencies ranging across much of the audible
spectrum. These sounds are produced by restricting and sometimes momentarily stopping the stream of
exhaled air as it passes from the lungs, through the vocal tract to exit through the mouth or nose.
Speakers have only one set of vocal cords and so variations in the pitch of the voice have to be achieved
by tightening and slackening the muscles and thereby altering both the length and the thickness of the
cords and thereby the frequency at which they vibrate.
Whereas boys and girls have similarly pitched voices, the male vocal cords thicken and lengthen at
puberty and thus adult male voices have on average a significantly lower pitch than female voices,
although there is significant individual variation, which means that some female voices are naturally
lower in pitch than some male voices. In addition, in normal speech the pitch of the voice can vary within
a range of an octave to an octave and a half, so there is a great deal of individual variation for the forensic
phonetician to focus on, both in terms of the average pitch of a voice over time and the degree of
movement above and below that average.
Much acoustic analysis focuses on the underlying pitch of the voice and on vowel formants rather than on
consonant phenomena, although nasal consonants are forensically important because the relative rigidity
and complicated internal structure of the nasal cavity
‘ensures a low within-speaker variation … and … relatively high between speaker variation’
Speaker profiling
There are times when the police have a recording of a criminal’s voice but no suspect, and are thus
anxious to glean any information at all that might enable them to narrow down the suspect group. For
instance, the phonetician may be able to derive information about the regional and/or social accent of the
speaker and whether the accent is authentic or assumed.
Speaker Identification By Professionals

The vast majority of the cases undertaken by forensic phoneticians are in fact speaker identification; these
are cases where there is a recording of a voice committing a crime and one or more suspects and the
phonetician is asked to express an opinion as to whether any of the suspect voices does or does not match
that of the criminal.
A basic problem to overcome is that there will always be differences between any two speech samples,
even when they come from the same speaker and are recorded on the same machine and on the same
occasion. So, the task for the forensic phonetician
Involves being able to tell whether the inevitable differences between samples are more likely to be
within-speaker differences or between-speaker differences.
Discrimination becomes progressively easier the more features or dimensions or parameters are included
in the comparison, but even so some features are more discriminatory than others. The ideal ones to
choose:
 Show high between-speaker variability and low within-speaker variability
 Are resistant to attempted disguise or mimicry
 Have a high frequency of occurrence in the relevant materials
 Are robust in transmission
 Are relatively easy to extract and measure
 And are maximally independent of other parameters.
In addition, the forensic phonetician may note impressions of distinctive voice quality using some of the
categories proposed by Laver (1980) in his The Phonetic Description of Voice Quality.
The Work of The Document Analyst

There are two groups of experts on text analysis with whom we will be hardly concerned at all, despite
their labels – graphologists and handwriting analysts. Graphologists are not, as the name at first implies,
in some way equivalent to phonologists; that is, working on the written instead of the spoken substance of
languages. Rather, the expertise they claim is the ability to link certain handwriting features to ‘character’
and thereby, for instance, to be able to comment on a person’s suitability for a particular employment.
However, as no one has managed to make their analyses replicable, we will not consider it further.
Handwriting analysts have much firmer scientific credentials. They focus on distinct letter forms, or
graphemes, and on graphitic variation within each form. Just as there can be marked variation in
pronunciation within the speech of a single speaker, so there can be marked variation within the letter
forms of a single writer and handwriting analysts work on the assumption that, although there will be
overlap between writers so that sometimes some individual symbols will be indistinguishable, taking the
totality of the forms, each writer is unique. As Ellen (1989: 29) puts it:
there is no practical possibility that one [writer] will resemble [any] other in every respect.
Conclusion
Whereas the forensic linguist can make a lot of progress in many cases with a simple set of descriptive
tools and little more than a pencil, the modern forensic phonetician is highly dependent on computerized
acoustic analysis; indeed, their professional association – International Association for Forensic Phonetics
– has recently added ‘and Acoustics’ to reflect this. What this means for you, the reader, is that while you
can try your hand at some forensic linguistic problems, unless you have a good training in phonetics and
acoustics and access to sophisticated software, forensic phonetics will be something you can only learn
about by reading.
Handwriting analysis is more accessible, more a case of learning to discriminate, and while only those
with access to specific equipment can create ESDA prints, the reading and interpreting of them is still an
art rather than a science.

The Work of The Forensic Phonetician

Uploaded by

Copyright:

Available Formats

The Work of The Forensic Phonetician

Uploaded by

Document Information

Copyright

Available Formats

Share this document

Share or Embed Document

Sharing Options

Did you find this document useful?

Is this content inappropriate?

Copyright:

Available Formats

The Work of The Forensic Phonetician

Uploaded by

Copyright:

Available Formats

The Work of The Forensic Phonetician and The

A Brief Digression on The Acoustic Analysis of Speech

Speaker Identiﬁcation By Professionals

The Work of The Document Analyst

You might also like