ENF (Electric Network Frequency) analysis
Definition
A method that tracks the recorded mains-frequency component (nominally 50 Hz or 60 Hz) through an audio file and compares its fluctuation pattern against a time-stamped reference database. Breaks in the ENF pattern, or a pattern spanning multiple non-contiguous time windows, indicate that segments from different recording sessions have been joined.
Related terms
- Background noise profiling
- Statistical characterisation of the ambient noise floor in quiet segments of a recording, including its average level, spectral shape, and stationarity. Changes...
- Discontinuity
- Any point in an audio recording where a physical property of the signal changes abruptly in a way inconsistent with natural acoustic...
- Phase discontinuity
- An abrupt change in the phase of a periodic component of the audio signal. In a continuous recording, the phase of background...
- Room-tone tail
- The natural reverberation that follows a sound event in an enclosed space. Each room has a characteristic decay time and spectral shape....
- Spectrogram
- A time-frequency plot in which the horizontal axis is time, the vertical axis is frequency, and colour or brightness encodes signal energy....
Explained in
- Detecting Discontinuities in Audio RecordingsA method that tracks the recorded mains-frequency component (nominally 50 Hz or 60 Hz) through an audio file and compares its fluctuation pattern against a tim...