The Tanner-Culbertson Aural Method of Voice Identification: A Reasonable Alternative to Spectrographic Voice Prints

The use of voice prints, or spectrographic voice identification, has been around for several decades. This highly developed technology uses complex algorithms to break the speech signal down into its component parts: time, frequency, and energy. The result is a spectrogram, also known as a voice print, that allows visual or computer comparisons between two or more audio samples. Voice prints are used for forensic purposes to permit law enforcement personnel to match a suspect’s voice to audio recordings of unknown subjects. While voice prints provide law enforcement personnel with a valuable investigative tool, there are several problems with them.