Word: voiceprints
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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...victim the night of the murder. The evidence against Topa was strong but largely circumstantial: bits of wool found on his bloodstained jacket matched the woman's coat. The most striking evidence came from a sound spectrograph, a machine that reduces speech to electronic "pictures" called spectrograms or voiceprints. Lieut. Ernest Nash, Michigan State Police expert, testified at Topa's trial in 1973 that the voiceprint of the telephone confession matched Topa's, not Ferretti's; he also argued that voiceprints were as accurate as fingerprints...
Time Inc. authenticated the tapes by voiceprint analysis-an electronic method of matching the voice patterns on the tapes with recorded Khrushchev speeches-and published Khrushchev Remembers, first as a series of four articles in LIFE, and subsequently as a Little, Brown book. Khrushchev himself was never involved directly with Little, Brown or Time Inc. Therefore, when the first volume of his memoirs was published in the West, he could truthfully tell an irate Arvid Pelshe, chairman of the Party Control Commission, that he had never "turned over" his memoirs to anyone. Under pressure from Pelshe, Khrushchev made a statement...
...seemed a random attack on "police in general," and the only clue was the telephone call, which had been routinely taped. To find a matching voice, police interrogated 13 women in the neighborhood. At each interview they made "voiceprints"-electronic "pictures" of the individual's voice. Because her voiceprint matched the taped call, Caroline Trimble, 18, was arrested and later indicted for first-degree murder...
Conceived in 1941 as a way for the deaf to "read" speech, the voice-print machine analyzes patterns of frequency and amplitude, transcribing each variation into a spectrogram. One of the chief developers, Physicist Lawrence Kersta, claims that everyone's voiceprint is as unique as his fingerprints, and that any skilled technician can identify a voiceprint with more than 99% accuracy. Other scientists have disputed his claims...
...earlier cases involving voiceprints came before courts in New Jersey (1967) and California (1968), and both times the appeals courts rejected the device as unreliable. Among the experts who opposed voiceprints at the time was Oscar Tosi, a professor of audiology at Michigan State; since then, however, Tosi has compared some 34,000 voiceprints under a $300,000 grant from the Justice Department, and the evidence has convinced him. In the case of Caroline Trimble, he testified in favor of voiceprint evidence, and Minnesota Supreme Court Chief Justice Oscar Knutson agreed with...