ABSTRACT
A central task in many criminal investigations and subsequent court cases is to establish identity between a suspect and the perpetrator of a crime. An important class of evidence given by ordinary wit-
nesses concerns identity, and much forensic scientific activity has this as its goal. In the most familiar kinds of cases a witness may simply say ‘yes, that’s the person I saw’ on the basis of physical appearance, or a forensic scientist may base an opinion on a fingerprint or on DNA samples, both of which relate directly to the organic make-up of the person(s) involved. However, another kind of case is becoming more and more familiar: the kind in which the basis of the identification is a person’s voice. In this event, we enter the realm of forensic speaker identification. We might consider forensic speaker identification evidence under two broad categories: ‘naïve,’ where it is a matter of a witness identifying a voice; and ‘technical,’ where an expert brings specialist skills to bear on recorded speech samples (Nolan, 1983, p. 7).
