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Short abstract:

The paper deals with the establishment of audio forensic expertise in Cold War Czechoslovakia and shows that the contested nature of sound-based objectivity and speaker identification contributed to the rise of probabilistic scientific claims in the courtroom.

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.