NCJ Number
130257
Date Published
1990
Length
384 pages
Annotation
Intended for scientists, engineers, technicians, attorneys, and law enforcement personnel, this book examines the problems and issues associated with forensic phonetics.
Abstract
Part I discusses basic issues in acoustics including simple acoustics; how speech is produced, coded, and perceived; and the nature of such instruments as microphones, earphones, and tape recorders. Part II considers the sources of forensic problems on tape recordings and what to do about them. Topics discussed are the various forms of electronic surveillance and the tape recording of evidence, the characteristics of distortion and noise, the decoding process/techniques and problems with courtroom transcripts, and the authentication of tape recordings. Part III addresses the identification of speakers from their voice alone. Issues covered are voice identification by aural-perceptual means, the use of human listeners to make aural-perceptual judgments of a talker's identify, the voiceprint approach to speaker identification and its limitations, and machine or computer-assisted approaches to voice identification. Part IV addresses the general problem of detecting stress in the human voice. One chapter in this part considers the implications of vocal stress for polygraph examinations. Part V addresses language evaluation for forensic purposes, forensic psychoacoustics, the pirating of tape recordings, and crimes involving computers. 513 references, chapter tables, and a subject index