Speaker identification by speech spectrograms: a scientists' view of its reliability for legal purposes.

Can you reliably identify a person by examining the spectrographic patterns of his speech sounds? This is a scientific problem of social consequence because of the interest of the courts in this question. The Technical Committee on Speech Communication of the Acoustical Society of America has asked some of its members to review the matter from a scientific point of view. The topics they considered included the nature of speech information as it relates to speaker identification, a comparison of voice patterns and fingerprint patterns, experimental evidence on voice identification, and requirements for validation of such identification methods. Findings and conclusions are reported; supporting information is given in appendixes.