UNIT 1: Introduction to Speaker Profiling

Imagine you hear someone speaking in a crowded room, but you cannot see who it is. How can you often tell whether it's a friend, a family member, or a stranger? Subconsciously, our minds are sorting through speaker profiles and patterns of speech, trying to find a match to the voice. So in a way, we all create speaker profiles of those around us. And, from a scientific point of view, speaker profiling involves creating a demographic profile of a person solely based on their voice. Intriguing, right? Our voices are unique and carry a lot of information about us, such as demographic information like our age, gender or even where we grew up. 

It may sound like something from a spy novel, but speaker profiling is used in forensic science for investigation. Why? Because as mentioned before, our voice is one of the most personal and unique aspects of ourselves, providing insight into our identity and enabling the detection of crimes. Our voices provide even more insight into ourselves than a fingerprint would.

Activity 1: The Mystery of

the Stolen Lindt Recipes

Exercise 1: 
 

In the renowned Lindt chocolate factory, valuable chocolate recipes were stolen. The only clue: an audio recording containing voices of several individuals during the theft. Detective X, known for their expertise in speaker profiling, is tasked with creating a map of the thieves based on their voices to determine their origins. 

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Listen to these recordings and try to see if you can identify the country of origin that these speakers come from. Not all of them are native English speakers.

UNIT 2: Diving Deeper into Features of Speech

Now in order to create a concrete speaker profile of the suspect, we need to distinguish between phonetic and linguistic features.

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By making this distinction between these two types of features, a more precise and detailed analysis of the speaker profile can be conducted. This allows for the identification of specific characteristics that are unique to a speaker.

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We look at both phonetic and linguistic features as they represent different levels or dimensions of language. For example: 

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Phonetic features pertain to the physical and acoustic properties of speech. They can be categorized into segmental and suprasegmental features. Segmental features, for instance, involve analyzing the fundamental frequency (think about the pitch of a voice, which for example tends to be lower in men due to longer and thicker vocal cords) and resonance or formants that determine the tonal characteristics of a voice. Suprasegmental features include aspects such as intonation, stress patterns, and rhythm, all of which contribute to the recognizable pattern of an accent.

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On the other hand, linguistic features concern the structure and use of language itself, encompassing properties related to content and specific expressions in language (e.g., vocabulary, sentence structures, errors, or the use of idioms such as letting the cat out of the bag).