Forensic audio services offer quality responses to issues that may put the integrity and reputation of individuals or companies at risk in the context of a dispute, litigation or negotiation.
We extract knowledge and information of high added value from audio and voice recordings so that they have probative value and avoid being challenged for errors, inconsistencies in the procedure or lack of impartiality.
The audio expert must have the appropriate tools and technology to prove whether an audio recording is complete and of a single sequence or, on the contrary, whether it has been intentionally manipulated by erasing or editing speech segments.
On other occasions it will be necessary to identify the speakers of a recording using voice biometrics and phonetic-acoustic analysis tools to draw conclusions regarding the speaker’s identity. In this case cell phone forensics in the US will provide you their best services.
In complex cases of family violence, investigation of accidents and other criminal acts, the audio expert must follow a forensic methodology that allows warning or certifying the origin and emission source of a certain sound (isolating voice segments and parameterizing electroacoustic events extracted of ambient sound).
In the case of cross-expert reports, the methodology used by the counterparty’s expert is examined in depth, trying to locate any error, failure, and other elements that may have been overlooked, due to lack of technical resources, lack of diligence or impartiality.
Audio Cleaning: Most Frequent Uses
Audio restoration and cleaning is a more delicate process than we may think. Currently, there are processing tools and software to significantly improve the quality of an audio recording, always within the parameters that acoustic physics allows and with the limitations of the audio file itself in terms of its properties (bit resolution, frequency sampling, bandwidth, etc.).
In What Cases Is It Usual To Resort To It?
Cleaning and restoring recordings is an increasingly common procedure. Today everyone has a phone with an audio and video recording application, and on many occasions, the recordings are not of sufficient quality because they are made in hidden mode. For example, the recorder hidden in a vehicle, the recorder stored inside clothing, a bag or another accessory, and often in a noisy environment. Depending on the type of matter and expert objective, the cleaning and processing of an audio recording adds value in the following cases:
- Improved Intelligibility. Sometimes it is necessary to improve the intelligibility of the recording to be able to perform the full verbatim transcription. This is frequent when the interlocutors speak overlapping, move away from the recording device or lower the volume during the emission of some phonemes in a fluent and spontaneous conversation. In addition, if the conversation takes place in a noisy environment (street, cafeteria) or with high reverberation (interiors of closed and wide spaces), it is likely that an audio cleaning and audio restoration procedure will have to be carried out.
- Ambient sound treatment. In some cases we can look for the opposite effect. What is needed is to amplify the ambient sound to extract non-vocalic fragments that help to reconstruct the crime scene (cases of family abuse, for example). In this article, to see audios in cases of family abuse, you can learn more about this topic. In the case of accident investigation it will be interesting to isolate some sounds corresponding to the sound of the engine, instrumentation and acoustic witnesses. This is what had to be done in the fatal accident at the Seville airport.
- Announcer identification. With this tool we can carry out a comparative analysis of voice (undoubted and doubtful sample). For this, it is necessary to obtain clear and slender voice formants that allow characterizing the vowel sounds. With this, a phonetic-acoustic analysis is performed correctly.
The audio processing and cleaning tools allow you to amplify voice segments and eliminate any type of noise or impurity that could affect a result obtained in an objective and transparent manner.
