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Audio Analysis: Intelligibility Enhancement

1) Audio analysis techniques like filtering can help make speech more intelligible but don't always yield more transcript words; removing noises may aid transcription. 2) Enhancing covert recordings is uncommon as they are usually inadmissible, but they may aid investigations though effects can't be publicly assessed. 3) Integrity and authenticity examinations of analog audio use techniques like visual tape inspection and magnetic development, but digital editing is harder to detect.

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Khadija Saeed
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66 views

Audio Analysis: Intelligibility Enhancement

1) Audio analysis techniques like filtering can help make speech more intelligible but don't always yield more transcript words; removing noises may aid transcription. 2) Enhancing covert recordings is uncommon as they are usually inadmissible, but they may aid investigations though effects can't be publicly assessed. 3) Integrity and authenticity examinations of analog audio use techniques like visual tape inspection and magnetic development, but digital editing is harder to detect.

Uploaded by

Khadija Saeed
Copyright
© © All Rights Reserved
We take content rights seriously. If you suspect this is your content, claim it here.
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Audio Analysis

Intelligibility Enhancement
Although the use of dedicated filtering hard- and software is widespread in the latter type of work, the net
effect of the use of this equipment in terms of getting additional words down on paper is not always
impressive. In fact, a large proportion of the work carried out under this heading is probably primarily of
a cosmetic nature; in judiciaries with a jury system in particular it is often necessary for all relevant
speech recordings to be played in court. Removing unpleasant noises may facilitate listening for
uninitiated listeners like members of the jury; it may also reduce fatigue and thereby increase productivity
in those who have to transcribe large quantities of speech recorded under forensic real-world conditions.
The enhancement of clandestine or covert recordings, other than those made by private citizens, is not a
core activity for many forensic laboratories for the simple reason that covert recordings made by police or
other investigative forces will not normally be ruled admissible by a criminal court of law. Information
obtained from such recordings cannot therefore be used for evidential purposes. The extent to which
information obtained from enhanced audio recordings may play a role as an investigative tool and the
efficacy of covert recording is hard to assess because by definition these matters do not lend themselves
to public scrutiny.
The public image of this type of activity is strongly shaped by publications like Spycatcher and the
Francis Ford Coppola film The Conversation (1974), in which Gene Hackman plays an audio surveillance
expert who is slowly caving in under the psychological pressure of his job.
To achieve the best results in transcribing questioned utterances in low to extremely low-quality
recordings the use of highly competent and educated native speakers of the language variety in question is
strongly recommended. A thorough familiarity with the accent and dialect of the speakers in the
recording, as well as some familiarity with the details of the case, will often enable the analyst to
compensate for the loss of redundancy of linguistic cues that is characteristic of poor-quality recordings.

Integrity and Authenticity Examinations of Audio Recordings


An interesting development in the field of authenticity and integrity examinations of audio recordings in
the analogue domain is the use of Faraday crystals as pioneered by a number of Russian scientists. This
may well turn out to be a welcome complement to the existing array of techniques in this field.
Traditionally, these include visual inspection of the tape and its housing, auditory analysis of the
recording, magnetic development of the magnetization patterns on the tape track, narrow band spectrum
analysis of the recorded signal, and, last but not least, high resolution waveform analysis of the signal.
The analysis of replay transients, as Dean calls them, plays a central role in these examinations. They may
frequently shed light on the way in which the recordings on a questioned tape were made and may help
establish the order in which these recordings were made. Unfortunately, there is still a relative dearth of
experimental data on the reliability, robustness and consistency of replay transients of different tape
recorders and there is still considerable uncertainty about the extent to which they may be used to identify
individual analogue audio recorders.
However, the new visualization techniques may well reveal characteristics with the degree of detail that is
required to improve the discriminatory power to the extent where it may be possible to trace a particular
recording to a particular source recorder rather than merely to a particular brand and type.
In spite of this new development, overall prospects for this particular branch of forensic audio analysis are
not too bright. The increasingly widespread availability of relatively inexpensive digital sound processing
equipment and its ease of operation make certain types of manipulation comparatively easy to perform. If
done competently, such manipulation may leave no traces and might therefore be impossible to detect
from an engineering point of view.
Failure to find positive evidence of copying and/or manipulation does not therefore imply that the
recording under investigation must be a complete and uninterrupted magnetic registration of the acoustic
events it is supposed to represent. Faced with recordings of extremely incriminating telephone
conversations which were only available as copies, defense experts have been known to turn this
argument round: if the recording is a copy it cannot be authenticated and must therefore be viewed with a
high degree of suspicion regarding its authenticity. Not unnaturally, defense lawyers will pick this up and
argue that this means that any recording that is not claimed to be an original recording but a copy should
be ruled inadmissible as evidence because there is no way in which its integrity can be established.
However, the mere fact that a recording is a copy does not ipso facto make it likely to have been tampered
with.
The reservations made with respect to the authentication of analogue audio recordings apply even more
strongly to digital audio recordings. These are becoming more numerous as digital dictation machines are
becoming more and more common. As part of the chain-of-custody process, audio recordings, like all
digital data, are increasingly required to be authenticated by means of checksums, hash codes or other
methods to ensure their integrity.

Disputed Utterances
There are relatively few reports of work undertaken in this area. French provides an illustration of some
of the procedures that may be helpful here. A related issue is the growing demand for speech recognition
systems to meet the need to transcribe enormous quantities of forensic speech recordings. At present, the
vast quantities of recorded speech generated by telephone interception systems are transcribed by
relatively highly paid and trained human listeners. Most commercially available speech-to-text systems
require extensive learning sessions, a (single) co-operative speaker and relatively high-quality recordings
to meet acceptable performance standards and are therefore unsuitable for forensic use. Interestingly, the
Lithuanian Institute of Forensic Examination in Vilnius reports a system called Transcriber, produced by
the Speech Technologies Centre, Russia, which it claims to be using for the automatic conversion of
speech to text.

Organizations and Conferences


The Working Group on Forensic Audio (SC-03-12) of the Audio Engineering Society (AES) has recently
published a second standard procedure for forensic audio. The first, AES27, was published in 1996 and
provides standards for managing recorded audio materials intended for examination. The AES Working
Group is working on several additional subjects including guidelines for forensic analysis. More
information can be found on its website www.aes.org. The FBI has developed its own standards for
forensic audio as part of its FAVIAU (Forensic Audio, Video and Image Analysis Unit) standards.
Both IAFP and the ENFSI Expert Working Group for Speech and Audio Analysis organize annual
conferences, frequently held back-to-back in the same venue or partly as a joint event. The proposed
venue for 2002 is Russia, for 2003 Turkey. The follow-up meeting to the Martigny (1994), Avignon
(1998) and Crete (2001) Speaker Recognition Tutorial and Research Workshops will be held in Toledo,
Spain in 2004. In December 2000, the Senior Managers of Australian and New Zealand Forensic Science
Laboratories (SMANZFL) established EESAG, the Electronic Evidence Specialist Advisory Group.
EESAG represents specialists involved in speech enhancement, audio and video recording analysis,
image and video enhancement, and the application of digital imaging to forensic science. Its aims include
the preparation of guidelines for digital image processing and for the management of recordings for the
purpose of forensic examination.

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