How voice experts help solve crimes
The University of Aberdeen's newly created Centre for Linguistic Research will today (Friday, May 16), welcome Dr Paul Foulkes from the Department of Language & Linguistic Science at the University of York to discuss the methods used in the analysis of speech for legal purposes.
His talk, entitled 'What you gonna do about this baby?': an introduction to forensic phonetics, will address some of the key issues and methods used in forensic speech analysis, and will draw on a fascinating range of real case material on which Dr Foulkes and other specialists have worked. He will also comment on a number of questions that are often asked about the area: for instance, who are the 'voice experts' who judge the authenticity of the voices on those Osama bin Laden and Saddam Hussein tapes, and how do they do it? Why is it commonly (but wrongly) believed that it is possible to make 'voiceprints' of suspects in the same way as detectives use fingerprinting? And if a suspect is trying to disguise his or her speech, what aspects of the voice can't be disguised?
Dr Foulkes works closely with Dr Peter French, also based in York, whose expertise was called upon in the recent high-profile 'Millionaire Coughing Case'.
The University of Aberdeen's Centre for Linguistic Research, which was formed in 2002, brings together staff working in various areas of linguistics, and particularly sociolinguistics, with an emphasis on variation and change in varieties of English, immigrant Englishes, Scots, language in the British Isles, and a variety of issues around language and identity. A major project is underway to study the interaction of social and linguistic factors in the spoken vernaculars of towns and cities in the north-east of England and the north-east of Scotland, and there are collaborative links with projects in other British universities and institutions in Europe and the United States.