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- Convenor:
-
Anna Kvicalova
(Charles University)
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- Format:
- Traditional Open Panel
Short Abstract:
The panel examines the role of sonic skills in producing forensic evidence and investigates the specificity of sound-based objectivity and forms of representation in forensics. It addresses the scientific, cultural, and political underpinning of forensic audio expertise in varied historical contexts
Long Abstract:
The notion of the human voice as a unique biometric identifier and the rise of technologies for recording and graphically representing sound has made sound analysis an integral part of forensic science in the twentieth century. Although recording, classifying, and dissecting sounds of speech and other events have long been integral to criminalistics, forensic objectivity has been primarily associated with technologies of visual representation such as photography. This panel, in contrast, will examine the role of sonic skills in gathering, interpreting, and producing different kinds of forensic evidence and investigate the specificity of sound-based objectivity in forensics.
Forensic objectivity is best be understood as an assemblage of criminal procedures, witness testimonies, and the means of representing and constructing evidence. This is created and maintained not only in forensic science laboratories and in the courtroom, but in dialogue with the much broader cultural and political environment. Bringing together the notions of “forensic cultures” and “sonic skills”, the panel will address the scientific, cultural, and political underpinning of forensic audio expertise across different legal systems and historical periods as well as the changing status of sound-based knowledge and forms of representation in forensics. What must be done with sonic traces to translate them into different kinds of legal and criminalistic evidence? Which forms of speaker identification and sound detection have been accepted as admissible evidence in criminal courts and other forensic contexts? What is the role of machine listening and AI in acoustic intelligence and surveillance? The panel welcomes papers that address these or related issues in different cultural, historical, and legal contexts.
Accepted papers:
Session 1Josephine Hoegaerts
Short abstract:
The paper traces the cultural and scientific history of categorizing and recognizing unique features of the human voice in the nineteenth century, when various visual and mechanical means started to be developed in the documentation and storage of sound.
Long abstract:
This paper aims to sketch out a cultural and scientific history of documenting, classifying and identifying voices in the nineteenth century. Focusing on a period before technologies like the spectogram, or acoustic recording devices became widely available, I aim to demonstrate that experts in this period already harboured many of the ideas and ambitions that would later drive the development of technologies in speech recognition and the voiceprint. First, the idea that each human voice was unique – and could therefore be used as a tool to recognize an individual – was thoroughly developed in the nineteenth century, and scientific underpinnings for this premise were studied. Secondly, various embodied techniques for the description, comparison and recognition of particular voices were developed throughout the century, mobilizing both the human ear and visual aids. Drawing on insights from the fields of voice studies and sound studies, and based on scientific, pedagogical, and musical expertise formulated and circulated in Britain, France, and Germany in the nineteenth century, the paper teases out the trajectory of these techniques, as well as changing vocabularies to represent vocal uniqueness. Central to the idea that voices were “as different from each other as faces,” were cultural assumptions about distinctions between different (European) national, cultural, and gendered voices, making the pre-history of speech recognition a cultural history, as much as it is a history of science or technology.
Johanna Hühn (Goethe Universität Frankfurt)
Long abstract:
In the context of the 1926 Berlin Police Exhibition, a collaboration developed between the Lautarchiv (then Lautabteilung), Prussian police, and prison administration. This paper discusses how sound recordings of prisoners, framed as “voice portraits”, were presented as potential forensic evidence. It discusses the bid to promote sound recording and reproduction technology as a promising tool for police investigation and establish the voice records not only as biometric identifiers to be cataloged in police databases but also as evidence of a prisoner’s character and inclinations. It ties the claim to the evidential characteristics of the voice to the idea of “anthropophonetics”, proposed by the Lautabteilung’s director Doegen as a science in its own right, based on phonetic examination. Bringing together a range of archival documents, I consider the emphasis on technological innovation and expert skill in the effort to create scientific credibility and legitimacy to appeal to the modernizing ambitions of the Prussian police. I connect the recording project to a broader shift to prioritize “the criminal’s character” rather than “the character of the crime”, as discernible in the reforms of the Prussian penitentiary system, the increasing institutionalization of “criminal biology”, and specifically, the intensifying discourse around so-called “habitual criminals”. Noting that many of the recorded inmates were arrested for property crimes, I link the claims about properties of the voice and proper technique to the challenges to property relations emerging in the prisoners’ recordings.
Anna Kvicalova (Charles University)
Long abstract:
The paper deals with the establishment of sound-based forensic expertise in Cold War Czechoslovakia and argues that it was at the forefront of a more general shift in grasping the relationship between evidence, objectivity, and the means of formulating an expert opinion in forensics. It shows that the contested nature of sound-based objectivity, pertaining to the inconclusiveness of the spectrographic images of the voice and a continuous reliance on professional audition in sound analysis, directly contributed to the rise of probabilistic claims in forensic science more generally, both in the Eastern Bloc countries and in the West. By attending to the process in which sounds from anonymous calls and wiretapped phone lines were translated into different kinds of legal and criminalistic evidence, the paper shows how forensic science negotiated objective knowledge at the intersection of aural analysis and automated speech dissection. The probability scale, which stemmed from the interactions between audio forensic laboratory work, judicial system of evidence-making, and cultural notions of sound and hearing, introduced elements of manageable uncertainty to the performance of scientific expertise in the courtroom. As such, it challenged the fantasy of mechanical objectivity embodied by machine-based analytical methods and prefigured much of the later debates about the nature and status of science in the courtroom.