B

In Journal of the Audio Engineering Society (1956 ), 4, 14-23.

The use of spectrograms and a pattern playback for research on speech has the unique advantage that it permits the study of isolated acoustic cues for speech perception. This method has shown that the consecutive sounds of the language are usually so intimately connected that they cannot be separated and recombined in a different order without a serious loss in intelligibility. Formant transitions, which often characterize the consonants, are found to fall into well-defined patterns and groups. The knowledge gained by studies with synthetic speech has guided the construction of a speech synthesizer which copies the sounds generated by the human speech organs and which can be operated from the information found in spectrograms.

In: 1969, Science, 166, 338-343.

How do scientists view the reliability of speaker's speech spectrogram for use as legal evidence?

In: Journal of the Acoustical Society of America, 1970, 47, 597-612.

Can you reliably identify a person by examining the spectrographic patterns of his speech sounds? This is a scientific problem of social consequence because of the interest of the courts in this question. The Technical Committee on Speech Communication of the Acoustical Society of America has asked some of its members to review the matter from aa scientific point of view. The topics they considered included the nature of speech information as it relates to speech identification, aa comparison of voice patterns and fingerprint patterns, experimental evidence on voice identification, and requirements for validation of such identification methods. Findings and conclusions are reported; supporting information is given in appendixes.