Guest talk by Dr. Dominic Watt (University of York)
In this talk, Dr. Dominic Watt will introduce the field of forensic phonetics: the application of speech analysis in the criminal justice system. Forensic phoneticians work mainly with speech recordings from a wide variety of sources: intercepted phone calls, voicemail messages, covert recordings made using concealed devices ('bugs' and 'wires'), or captured from video soundtracks (e.g. CCTV footage). They undertake two main forms of analysis: 'speaker profiling', in which the speaker in an incriminating recording is unknown and the goal is to help the police or intelligence services identify a suspect, and 'voice comparison', where the task is to compare the criminal sample with a recording of a suspect, typically made during a police interview. Occasionally, the question is 'what was said?' rather than 'who was talking?'. Dr. Watt will illustrate each type of inquiry using example cases he has worked on, and will also touch upon how analagous methods are used where the linguistic evidence is in written rather than the spoken form.
he talk, which is part of my MA course Language and Identity, will take place on ZOOM on 19 October 2021, starting at 10.15h (Link: https://unil.zoom.us/j/99556110189) but you are also very welcome to join us in class, room 5033 in Anthropole.