Voiceprint Analysis in Forensic Science

Paper Summary:

Voiceprint analysis is the technique, method, and interpretation of listening and visualizing one's voice, usually a known person, comparing that information to a voice sample of a suspect or victim involved with a crime, and coming to a conclusion of whether or not that voice does indeed match the known voice and to what degree of certainty does this analysis conclude. Techniques of the human voice can be cataloged onto a two or three-dimensional surface to be compared among suspects. The court has not always allowed this type of analysis because of testing and proficiency differences among expert witnesses.

From the Paper:

"More than one hundred years ago, Alexander Melville Bell, father to the better-known Alexander Graham Bell, believed that someone could be identified by the sound of his or her voice. This theory was put into practice by creating visual representations of spoken words in graph form. When gathering data from different participants, Bell observed and documented that all the participants, although saying the same word and each word followed a distinct pattern, had slight variations. By 1942, different telephone and voice laboratories were able to create a specific device to map ones voice onto a chart or graph. This device, the sound spectrograph, had the ability to construct a physical record of voice patterns derived from frequency, time, and intensity, by evaluating sound waves. This technology (first actively used during World War II in an attempt to identify and monitor enemy transmissions and communications) was not used in conjunction with the judiciary system for suspect identification purposes until 1962-1963, when first put to use in an FBI lab. The FBI needed a new technique to identify specific voice patterns and although Bell had his methods, there was no set method while the methods used had variable accuracy. Therefore, the FBI commissioned Lawrence Kersta to design a specific method in voiceprint analysis. After two years and 50,000 individual voice samples utilized, he designed and created a technique that had an acclaimed 99.65% accuracy."

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