Part I: Forensic Phonetics

In this part of our tutorial we will cover three areas. First we will position forensic speech science in its historical context. We will briefly describe the development from its modern beginnings with Voiceprints in the USA and Phonoscopy in Stalin's USSR to the present situation by giving you a glimpse of the advances as well as the controversies. Secondly we will present some fundamental issues in forensic phonetics research and see how our present knowledge can be applied in forensic fieldwork. In this part of the tutorial, the focus will be on human voice recognition and discrimination and how factors like memory, familiarity, language, disguise etc. influence these abilities. Lies and deception are age-old problems in forensic investigations. It is therefore not surprising that many people have tried to find ways of detecting deception. We will describe attempts to use the information conveyed by the human voice in lie detection and recent experiments using brain scan methods (fMRI) to approach the problem. In the description of these efforts we will also make an attempt to draw the line between methods, the use of which in forensics, can be justified on scientific grounds and methods which are speculative at best and outright bogus in the worst case. For each topic we will present a list of suggested reading.