Digital Audio Forensics Fundamentals

Chapter 2

The history of audio forensics

Technological developments

The analogue years

Present-day digital audio forensics is a culmination of technological advances in the capture and analysis of sound propelled by a few significant events in which it was required as evidence in legal proceedings.

Although Thomas Edison is widely regarded as a pioneer in the field of audio, the first capture of sound is documented as the 10-second recording of a folk singer on the 9th of April 1860, in France. The device was named the Phonoautograph and consisted of a barrel-shaped horn attached to a stylus. The movement of the horn, and thus, the stylus, etched sound waves onto sheets of blackened paper which had previously been exposed to oil lamp smoke. ...