If you treasure audio like some of us do at WFMU, you would think Coppola's The Conversation would be the apex of dorkdom rising from the darkest realms of the recording world. But that shit is soo '74.
I haven't really kept up with how Hollywood has been portraying those in the business of "audio forensics". We hear alot about surveillance nowadays, but that was only part of Harry Caul's (Gene Hackman's character) job in The Conversation. The real meat of his job and of the film came from the decoding of the recorded information.
Now that magnetic recording devices have been relegated to the status of artifact , one wonders if Harry Caul would get as much female action in 2005 without having to roll around on a dusty warehouse floor, wrestling with yards of tape surrounded by tractor wheel sized reels. The audio forensic scientist in this day and age likely has a flat ass and an oversized forearm from sitting in front of a Mac with his digital editing software for hours on end.
A company called Computer Audio Engineering is one of the cutting-edge places out there in the business of decrypting audio for clients like the U.S. Department of Justice, insurance companies and defense lawyers. They perform services like "intelligibility enhancement" and "event sequence analysis", stuff I never would've imagined could be so sensitively disseminated. They also do good old fashioned telephone recording, of course with a digital retrieval system, duh!
Here's descriptions of their services, which I assume represents technology offered by similar firms out there. So if you're a Junior Dick with an ear for the ghosts in the machine you might want to investigate the possibilities in this field.
ADDENDUM-de-dum: Gorge yourself on audio geekdom, including flawed experiments and stupefying mp3s over on The Science of Sound blog!
>The Science of Sound blog!
great site. thank you for sharing.
Posted by: jeff | February 22, 2005 at 08:17 PM
Pseu and sound scientist types:
Excuse me for honking my horn, but the duck came down when I saw mention of the sonogram pix on the Science of Sound blog.
Oh, and block that metaphor!
Take a peek in the middle of my page of music for more sonogram pix,
in reference to the CD TRANSFORMS, CUNEIFORM 55011, by Dr. Nerve and friends,
http://www.echo.net/~jhhl/mp3.html
I wrote the Amiga program RGS (originally called DRW) in 1987, which lets you draw spectrograms,
and hear them in real time as you draw them, so I've been doing these kinds of hijinks for almost 17 years.
BTW, my cut on the WFMU "Sounds of the Northeastern DJs" premium 7" boxed set also has a spectral picture in it.
see also:
The Jazz Kissingers: http://www.echo.net/~jhhl/jk.html
Old Article on some of my other stuff: http://www.echo.net/~jhhl/software.html
Enough honking now. Carry on.
Posted by: Henry Lowengard | February 24, 2005 at 12:41 AM
http://www.aaevp.com/
Talk about yer ghosts in the machine!
Posted by: Sender | March 01, 2005 at 07:38 AM
all excellent audio tools!
Posted by: suangsangsky | July 31, 2006 at 09:43 PM
really good! i have never seen this!
http://www.yaodownload.com
Posted by: springflowersky | July 31, 2006 at 09:44 PM
hi, i want to know which software can i use to for voice comparison
Posted by: audiomann | January 22, 2009 at 11:55 AM
ok i have a question about what can i use to analises sounds and fine the diferent between them i have 10 diferent sounds but they are pretty similar when you heared if there is any software that i can use please let me know just like the one used in csi for phone identification sorry about my english
Posted by: jean paul | April 15, 2012 at 11:04 PM