re: #46 Liberty Hedgehog (fka Freedom Alligator)

Reading Tom Owen’s interesting interview re: forensic voice analysis: [Link: findarticles.com…]

Based on this interview, I’m ready to call Owen’s analysis pretty much worthless. He talks about how important it is to get a good sample, with the speaker speaking the same words in the same manner, and at least 20 words to work with. For instance, from the interview:

Examiner: Are you saying that where the human ear might be fooled, the spectrogram will reveal the truth?

Right. For example, when it looks like the same person but it doesn’t sound at all like the same person, then you have to be wary of the exemplar recording and wonder if you actually used the exact same words spoken in the same manner The experience of the examiner comes into play, because if you get on the phone with someone and tell him or her to say, “There’s a bomb in the building,” and he or she says, “There’s a bomb in the building,” that’s not good enough, because that’s going to skew your result. The individual must say the words exactly the way you direct him or her to say them.

So how an earth can you reliably compare a tape of someone speaking in a low tense voice with someone screaming unintelligibly?