Dr Calbert Graham
Senior Research Associate
SpecialisationPhonetics (speech science)
Research interestsMy current research interests centre on phonetic (speech science) theory and its applications in forensic speaker identification (and, in my previous research, language technology). Forensic phonetics is concerned with the analysis of spoken language for investigative purposes where the characteristics of an individual’s speech are critical to their identity. More and more court cases involve the need to establish the speaker of some recorded speech - a hoax emergency call, a fraudulent phone transaction, and so on. However, voices are not like fingerprints or DNA. A person's voice varies, depending for instance on whether they are sober or not, how loud and fast he or she is speaking, among many other factors. Despite this wide variation in speech, however, it is still subject to structural constraints that make processing by both humans and machine possible. My research focusses on the computational modelling of speech to isolate the invariant properties of a person’s voice or speech uttered in different contexts that are critical to their identity.
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