By Mark Esposito, Guest Blogger
The chair emeritus for the American Board of Recorded Evidence, Tom Owen, and Ed Primeau, a Michigan-based audio engineer and forensics expert, have independently concluded that the furtive pleas for help clearly heard on the 911 tapes are not George Zimmerman’s. Both acknowledged experts used voice enhancing software, but different techniques, to rate the probability of the voice being Zimmerman’s at no more than 48%. A 90% match is considered scientifically reliable.
In a report published by the Orlando Sentinel, Owen said he derived his conclusions based on biometric analysis. “It basically just means using personal characteristics for identification. A fingerprint scanner is an example of a biometric device. Much as the ridges of a human hand produce a fingerprint, each human voice has unique, distinguishable traits, Owen says. ‘They’re all particular to the individual.'” The expert recently used the technique to identify the accused killer of Sheila Davalloo in a 911 call made almost a decade ago.
Owen, who also served as the chief engineer for the New York Public Library’s Rodgers and Hammerstein Archives of Recorded Sound, said that, “as a result of [the testing], you can say with reasonable scientific certainty that it’s not Zimmerman.”
Ed Primeau agreed but went further, saying that, under the known circumstances, ” I believe that’s Trayvon Martin in the background, without a doubt. That’s a young man screaming.” Primeau used the technique of voice enhancement to reach his conclusion. Unlike biometric analysis, his method does require an in-context sample of the voice for testing.
An article in the Cleveland Plain Dealer published in 2010 describes the 66-year-old Owen and his cohort, Stuart Allen, this way:
[The pair have] more than six decades of experience between them in the forensic audio profession. They’ve worked with the FBI and other federal agencies, police departments, private detectives, prosecutors, defense attorneys, and news organizations. Many courts have designated them as expert witnesses. They’re good friends who sometimes are on opposing sides, but respect each other’s abilities. “Both of us are known as sort of contrarians,” Owen said.
Primeau is a former sound engineer in the movie industry who worked with
pop stars Anita Baker, Bob Seger, and Barry Manilow. Primeau has over thirty years of experience in voice identification and is a registered investigator for the American College of Forensic Examiners. He describes his work in voice identification as:
There can sometimes be differences in speech patterns that can help identify clues in your identification puzzle. I look for several similarities as well as differences, nasal resonance differences, voice tone with regard to inflection both similarities and differences.
The test results seem to present another blow to Zimmerman’s credibility who claimed that it was his voice on the tape — and not the African-American teen — heard crying out for help mere seconds before the fatal gun shot.
It is likely that similar audio testing is being conducted by the FBI’s Digital Evidence Laboratory’s Forensic Audio, Video, and Image Analysis Unit, based in Quantico, Virginia. Should they reach the same conclusions as Owen and Primeau, Zimmerman would almost certainly face charges in the death. An opposite result would go a long way in substantiating his claim of self-defense.
Source; msnbc; Orland Sentinel; Cleveland Plain Dealer
~Mark Esposito, Guest Blogger
Did you get your feelings hurt, Otteray Scribe? Do you have a problem with being corrected?
I left your use of an oscilloscope for automotive timing alone. Do you even know what timing is? Try to explain how an occilloscope can be used to set the timing of an engine. You can’t, because it can’t.
How appropriate that you should bring up ipse dixit. I was thinking the same thing myself.
“But nothing in either Daubert or the Federal Rules of Evidence requires a district court to admit opinion evidence that is connected to existing data only by the ipse dixit of the expert. A court may conclude that there is simply too great an analytical gap between the data and the opinion proffered.”
General Electric Co. v. Joiner, 522 US 136 – Supreme Court 1997
That analytical gap is exactly what we currently have here. There are ways to narrow that gap, but it has not been sufficiently narrowed to permit the conclusions of Owen and Primeau to overcome reasonable scrutiny.
@Malisha – Well Mr. Martin (the dad) already stipulated that the voice was NOT Trayvon’s. So know it’s not George’s either? Could it have been a neighbor screaming for help for both of them? Since SPD released the actual address of the killing (back yard) we now know the REAL names of the neighbor/witnesses that were there. One of them was the so-called “John” who’s real name is NOT John. Come to find out George’s sister also lives on Twin Trees Ln right next to the mailbox kiosk at the club house where he allegedly parked his SUV. Also you can see George’s white Chevrolet Suburban parked at his apartment at 1950 Retreat View on BING.com Maps.
I think George’s ex-fellow employee at the security company really hurt George’s story. He call’s George a Jekyll & Hyde person with a huge temper. He physically attacked a woman on the job and was fired. He even attacked a SPD police office once too.
Now his injuries: where’s the hematoma (lump) on the back of his head that would formed from a life-threatening head bashing concrete incident? Another neighbor claims he saw it at the scene. John Oliver (black family PAID friend and ex-WESH-TV News Anchor) says “It was 4 hours before he got to the police station…” He was trying to say that the Fire Dept cleaned up his hematoma’s, traumatic lesions, swollen nose bridge, and they miraculously disappeared later? Also 4-hours would put the cops too close to midnight shift change since they weren’t clear from the crime scene until 8-9PM.
Why would SPD take him to his home around the corner to clean up and change bloody clothes as one Einstein here claimed? That would break the evidence chain of custody and is not S.O.P. The responding Detective DID allegedly place George under arrest at the scene and cuffed him. Why? Because he believed he was lying about Trayvon finding and taking his Kel-Tek P-11 pistol from George’s waistband. The detective said “How could Trayvon find a gun that was supposed to be totally CONCEALED as per Mr. Zimmerman’s carry permit stipulates?” However, the arrest was overturned by state’s atty and he was released on O.R. (own recognizance).
What every right-wing pundit here is seeing on the back of George’s head at the SPD sally-port is just the swirl of the grain of his hair after his barber cut all that hair he had a few months ago. It’s not a cleaned-up laceration or lesions. What that so-called unbiased neighbor saw was either a hallucination or somebody put faked bandages on George at the scene.
NEWS FLASH; Austin Brown RETRACTS his initial report to SPD that he saw a man on the ground with a red shirt. Now it’s he did not see ANYTHING as it was too dark. His mom says he was pressured by SPD officer to say otherwise. He did, however, hear the gun shot.
It’s looking really bad for George. The new prosecutor assigned to the case is known as a “shark”. So the NRA better come up with more than $10k for his defense. Make it 100 times that. And they better get Dr. Kevorkian’s lawyer too. The clown they have now is a coward and walked off the set at MSNBC the other day.
Randy, I don’t think you understand the scientific principles being discussed here. Impressions are irrelevant. Ipse dixit</em) does not work in a courtroom.
Otteray Scribe,
“That is the auditory equivalent of looking at a drop of blood and trying to determine the blood type. Or showing me a fingerprint and asking the age and gender of whose it is.”
Bull Hockey. Every day, people all over the world accurately determine the sex and age of a person by their voice. Only on rare occasions do I mistake the sex or age group of a person on the other end of the phone. I doubt I could achieve such accuracy with a drop of blood or a fingerprint.
One of the first rules of using any piece of equipment is to test it against a known good source prior to using it on something critical. In this case I don’t think either of the two experts had a source of sufficient sample quality/quantity to reliably determine the age of the person calling for help, let alone the identity. I think a court ordered/voluntary sample of Zimmerman crying for help is crucial to any reliable conclusion.
By the Way… If you listened to the audio and were wondering…You’ll get a chuckle out of this.
Dredd:
It’s chilling to remember that were it not for the widespread public outrage, this case would have never been fully investigated and certainly no charges would have been even contemplated. It’s a promising sign of democracy in action and a relative good.
Randy 1, April 1, 2012 at 8:34 pm
Has a cry for help ever been used to identify the person who was crying for help? In other words, is the science sufficient to draw a reliable conclusion?
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OS et. al. covered this, but I would add one thing.
We need to remember burden of proof and persuasion. In the case in chief, i.e. did Zimmerman kill Martin with a gun, the burden is on the government to prove that beyond a reasonable doubt. Since Zimmerman admits this, the case in chief is cut and dried.
On the defense, Zimmerman has the burden of proof and persuasion on his affirmative defense (self defense) claim.
In that regard, Zimmerman’s case is getting shabbier and shabbier by the moment.
As a result, he is drawing wrath to himself, and would do better to give it up.
Likewise the officials, who conspired to help Zimmerman out of the murder of Martin.
I think the manning and doe cases are standard pleas, request and legal demands that I have served upon prosecutors…… Then I objected like hell when they try and use it……
Randy, identification of age and gender by how it sounds to the naked ear are irrelevant in spectrographic analysis. That is the auditory equivalent of looking at a drop of blood and trying to determine the blood type. Or showing me a fingerprint and asking the age and gender of whose it is.
It is what shows up on the spectrograph that matters. Here is an example of how that works in the real world. Your mechanic can tune up your car by ear; I know, because I have done that myself. However, the timing can be set much more accurately using an oscilloscope. You often see those being used at tuneup clinics. Trust the oscilloscope to be far more accurate than your ear.
OS:
I guess both would qualify under Daubert as experts in scream making.
The whole argument by anon is meaningless. The FBI will be handling the voice analysis and their guy, Dave Snyder, has qualified as an expert hundreds of times and in many federal courts. He should have very little problem with credentials or methodolgy in Florida state courts if that’s where the case ends up.
Voice identification evidence has been admissible for at least forty years and is very reliable in the right hands. Owen and Primeau are top notch guys and their results probably foreshadow the FBI’s findings. Owen’s worked with them many times.
Is this a man or a woman calling for Bob? Is it a child or an adult?
http://soundcloud.com/randy541/bob
Hilarious OS! We should test those “ideas” on Cheney and Rummy first.
mespo, they could bring in Dick Cheney and Donald Rumsfeld as consultants. I am sure they have some ideas.
Has a cry for help ever been used to identify the person who was crying for help? In other words, is the science sufficient to draw a reliable conclusion?
If it is, I would agree that a sample should be provided.
anon,
You didn’t ask anything about Daubert. You asked why I believed accredited expert witnesses instead of your ravings that the software was BULLSHIT (to quote). I told you because their testimony was admissible. If that doesn’t give you want you wanted, you should have been more specific.
OS:
I am imagining how the government might compel him to provide a voice exemplar of screaming if Zimmerman refused.
Doe v. United States, 487 U.S. 201, 209 (1988):
The Supreme Court has held some acts of production are
unprivileged such as providing fingerprints, blood samples,
or voice recordings. 487 US. at 210. Production of such
evidence gives no indication of a person’s thoughts or
knowledge because it is undeniable that a person possesses
his own fingerprints, blood, and voice. Id. at 210-11.
In accord, United States v. Dionisio, 410 U. S. 1, 410 U. S. 7 (1973)
Nice on point cite, Dredd.
The Manning case was one of the ones where a voice recording exemplar was obtained.
U.S. v Williams & Manning 583 F.2d. 1194 (2nd Cir., 1978) explains the scientific process of voice analysys, and comports very well with what Otteray Scribe has stated.
Mespo, I agree that I see no reason that he could refuse if ordered. What I meant was that if he did try to refuse, he and his attorney would have a lot of explaining to do to the judge to justify such an attempt at refusal. However, I do recall a couple of cases where voice sample recordings were ordered to be produced by a defendant, and they were produced despite the defense attorney making an objection for the record.