Transcription and voice comparison of noisy interceptions: remarks from an audio forensics report

The paper describes a case study of particular interest and representative of speaker identification and speech attribution problems in real environments. The authors were recruited as technical consultants by the accused (already convicted) person’s lawyer to report on a probable misidentification of her client in two environmental recordings, with the goal of obtaining a scientific analysis and subsequently requesting an eventual review of the sentence. The results, carried out by the experts blind to the overall criminal proceeding, led to a conclusion of rare clarity in this field, and to the evident presence of a clear mistake in the speaker’s voice attribution. It is believed that the description of the work (albeit anonymized) may be of strong interest to those working for the promulgation of audio forensics and forensic phonetics scientific methodologies in real contexts such as preliminary investigations and legal proceedings.