Voiceprint
Definition
Lawrence Kersta's 1962 term for the claim that the spectrographic pattern of an individual's speech is unique enough to serve as a forensic identifier analogous to a fingerprint. The term is now largely abandoned in scientific literature because the uniqueness claim was not validated.
- Coined
- 1962 by Lawrence Kersta
- Method
- Aural spectrographic comparison of speech patterns
- Current status
- Term largely abandoned in scientific literature
Common questions
Is a voiceprint as reliable as a fingerprint for identifying someone?+
No. The term voiceprint was coined in 1962 as an analogy to fingerprints, claiming that each person's spectrographic speech pattern is unique. However, scientists never validated this uniqueness claim, and the term is now largely abandoned in forensic literature.
What is a voiceprint, and why is it called that?+
A voiceprint refers to the visual pattern created when speech is analyzed with an aural spectrograph. Lawrence Kersta coined the term in 1962 as an analogy to fingerprints, claiming that each person's speech pattern was unique enough to serve as a forensic identifier. The fingerprint analogy was popular but is not scientifically established.
Why do forensic scientists no longer use the term voiceprint?+
The core claim of voiceprint analysis is that each person's speech pattern is forensically unique. Because this was never scientifically validated, the term fell out of favor in modern forensic literature and practice.
Related terms
- Likelihood Ratio (LR)
- The ratio of two conditional probabilities: the probability of the observed evidence given the prosecution's hypothesis (same source), divided by the probability...
- Daubert Standard
- The US federal evidentiary standard (Daubert v. Merrell Dow Pharmaceuticals, 1993) requiring that expert testimony be based on scientifically valid methods with...
- ENFSI BPM
- The ENFSI Best Practice Manual for Forensic Comparison of Speech (2015, rev. 2022); the operational standard for speaker comparison in European forensic...
- FASR
- Forensic Automatic Speaker Recognition. Likelihood-ratio framework using statistical speaker models (GMM, i-vectors, x-vectors).
- Formant
- A resonance peak in the vocal tract filter; F1 and F2 together characterise vowel quality (height and frontness), while F3 and higher...
- Formants (F1, F2, F3, F4)
- Resonant frequencies of the vocal tract that shape vowel quality. F1 and F2 together distinguish vowels (for example /i/ has low F1...
- Frye Standard
- The US legal test for admissibility of scientific evidence, originating from Frye v. United States (1923), which required that a technique be...
- Fundamental Frequency (F0)
- Rate of vocal-fold vibration during voiced speech, perceived as pitch. Typical adult male 80 to 180 Hz, adult female 165 to 255...
- IAVI (International Association of Voice Identification)
- Organisation founded by Kersta in the late 1960s to train and certify forensic voice identification examiners in the spectrographic comparison method. Certification...
- MFCC
- Mel-Frequency Cepstral Coefficients. The dominant acoustic feature set for automatic speaker recognition.
- NAS 1979 Report
- The National Academy of Sciences report 'On the Theory and Practice of Voice Identification,' which concluded that spectrographic voice identification lacked the...
- Proficiency Testing
- An external quality assurance programme in which a laboratory analyses blind samples distributed by an independent provider and submits results for comparison...
Explained in these topics
- Spectrographic Voiceprint History and Its Modern RejectionLawrence Kersta's 1962 term for the claim that the spectrographic pattern of an individual's speech is unique enough to serve as a forensic identifier analogou...
- Voice Analysis: Spectrography, Speaker Identification and Legal AspectsPopular but misleading term coined by Lawrence Kersta in 1962 for an aural-spectrographic comparison. The fingerprint analogy is not scientifically established.