The Study of Language

Qazi Wahaj ul Haq BSMC-346

What is forensic phonetics? Anyone that has come to America past the age of eighteen will be able to understand when I say that you can never shake your accent. (Martin Yan)1 Forensic Phonetics deals with speaker identification. Phoneticians can analyze and interpret the different voice patterns of people based upon organic, linguistic and paralinguistic differences.2 Forensic Phoneticians are called upon in cases relating hoax emergency calls, masked armed robberies, kidnappings, rape etc. We can with certain surety identify a voice or a sound and associate it with a particular source. 3 For example in a telephone call we can with ease and surety recognize the person on the other side, furthermore, geographical locations can be pinpointed due to specific sounds at those places, for example, river flowing, birds chirping, church bells, roadside etc. The overlapping of these sounds in a situation can give an exact location, like river and church bells together, gives that the source is near a river bank with a church close by.4 Every person has a unique acoustic signature that is called a voice print which is similar to a finger print and can be used to identify the speaker.5 Voice print is also called auralspectrographic identification, in which a sound is recorded and a spectrogram is generated which is then analyzed for pitches, highs and lows.6

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http://humanaccents.com/accents-in-the-media.html Lehiste, I. (1973) "Vowel and speaker identification in natural and synthetic speech", Language and Speech 3 Amino, K., & Arai, T. (2009). Effects of linguistic contents on perceptual speaker identification: Comparison of familiar and unknown speaker identifications. Acoustical Science and Technology 4 Rose, P., Osanai, T., & Kinoshita, Y. (2003). Strength of forensic speaker identification evidence: Multispeaker formant- and cepstrum-based segmental discrimination with a Bayesian likelihood ratio as threshold. International Journal of Speech Language and the Law 5 Baldwin J.R. and P. French. 1990. Forensic Phonetics. Pinter Publishers, London. 6 Lindh, J. (2004) "Handling the "Voiceprint" Issue", in Proceedings of FONETIK 2004. Department of Linguistics, Stockholm University, Stockholm, Sweden.

Suspect profiling is the main core of Forensic Phonetics; in this organic and linguistic analysis is done which defines the demographics of the speaker. In organic difference in tract length, vocal larynx, etc is noted and analyzed which depicts the ethnicity of the subject. While in linguistic analysis the accent/dialect and social, socioliguistic analysis defines the society where the subject was raised or belongs to. Furthermore, paralinguistic techniques are applied on the recording etc, to describe the mood of the speaker whether the speaker is anxious, in distress, tired, drunk, happy or sad etc.7 Forensics Phonetics is not an absolute science, which can determine with firm 100% assurety that the analysis is perfect. There are a lot of variables that had to be taken into account, which result in errors. Speech evidence cannot be compared with or given the same status as fingerprint or DNA evidence.8 The fingerprint and DNA sample are invariable, while speech changes with age, and can be impersonated etc.

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Lehiste, I. (1973) "Vowel and speaker identification in natural and synthetic speech", Language and Speech Hollien, H. (1990) "The phonetician as an expert witness: Ethics and responsabilities", in Rieber, R.- Stewart, W. (Eds.) The Language Scientist as an Expert in the Legal Setting. New York: New York Academy of Sciences

References:
Amino, K., & Arai, T. (2009). Effects of linguistic contents on perceptual speaker identification: Comparison of familiar and unknown speaker identifications. Acoustical Science and Technology Baldwin J.R. and P. French. 1990. Forensic Phonetics. Pinter Publishers, London Hollien, H. (1990) "The phonetician as an expert witness: Ethics and responsabilities", in Rieber, R.- Stewart, W. (Eds.) The Language Scientist as an Expert in the Legal Setting. New York: New York Academy of Sciences http://humanaccents.com/accents-in-the-media.html Lehiste, I. (1973) "Vowel and speaker identification in natural and synthetic speech", Language and Speech Lindh, J. (2004) "Handling the "Voiceprint" Issue", in Proceedings of FONETIK 2004. Department of Linguistics, Stockholm University, Stockholm, Sweden. Rose, P., Osanai, T., & Kinoshita, Y. (2003). Strength of forensic speaker identification evidence: Multispeaker formant- and cepstrum-based segmental discrimination with a Bayesian likelihood ratio as threshold. International Journal of Speech Language and the Law