Review of: Forensic Voice Identification

Dr. Hollien states that his most important reason for writing this book2 was to reduce the gap separating the two components of voice-identification professionals: engineers and phoneticians. As one of the latter group, he attributes the gap as arising, on the one hand, from the engineers' belief that the phoneticians are insufficiently quantitavie and, on the other, the phoneticians' belief that the engineers are ignorant of the “soft” information that assists in voice identification.3 Since, by profession and temperament, I value quantitavie evaluations of forensic techniques and am impatient with hand-waving arguments, I approached this review biased toward the engineering camp, which meant that I would be able to gauge how well the author succeeds in his gap-narrowing effort. Stated differently, I felt that I could gauge how half of his taget audience would receive the boo.