BRYAN VON REUTER: Audio Forensics, The 60-Cycle Hum, A Career Outside the Studio

Speaker 1 (00:00:00):

Welcome to the Unstoppable Recording Machine broadcast, brought to you by Jay-Z microphones. For over a decade, Jay-Z microphones has combined all the critical elements of World Press, microphone manufacturing, patented capsule technology, precision electronics, and innovative industrial design. Jay-Z microphone's, deep understanding of technology is informed by their open-minded, innovative approach. Trust us, sound can be glorious recorded. For more info, please go to JayZ mike.com. And now your host, Eyal

Speaker 2 (00:00:34):

Levi. Welcome to the URM podcast. I am Eyal Levi, and I just want to tell you that this show is brought to you by URM Academy, the world's best education for rock and metal producers. Every month on Nail the Mix, we bring you one of the world's best producers to mix a song from scratch, from artists like th of God, Ms. Suga Periphery A Day to Remember. Bring me the horizon, opec many, many more, and we give you the raw multitrack so you can mix along. You'll also get access to Mix Lab, our collection of bite-sized mixing tutorials and Portfolio Builder, which are pro quality multitracks that are cleared for use in your portfolio. You can find out [email protected]. Before we get into the show, I want to tell you about a brand new product we just launched the Complete Beginner's Guide to Recording Rock and Metal.

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So for more info, just reach out to [email protected] for details. That's D-Y-L-A-N at E-M-P-R-E-A-R s.com. Alright, here it goes. I will shut up now. Welcome to the Unstoppable Recording Machine Podcast. My guest today is Mr. Brian von Reuter, who is a musician and audio professional from the Bay Area in California. And the reason I'm saying audio professional is because it's got a job that we've never covered before, but is extremely fascinating I think. And it just goes to show that if you have a passion for audio and you don't fit the producer template, that's okay. There's plenty of things that you can do in the audio world that are just as cool just as I think, just as fascinating and just as captivating and just as useful. They've not way more useful for the good of society than being a producer. So basically what you would call Brian is an audio forensics examiner, and it's basically a discipline that seeks to uncover the truth and audio recordings that are submitted as evidence and court proceedings or other legal activities. So basically Brian uses audio to make sure that people don't get wrongly convicted or otherwise. Does that sound right?

Speaker 3 (00:05:05):

Yeah, I answer questions about recordings so that advocates have the ability to make assertions and understand a recorded event.

Speaker 2 (00:05:16):

Got it. And you focus on working with defense attorneys? Correct?

Speaker 3 (00:05:22):

Most of my work is from defense attorneys. There's the odd government agency. I do one project for the California Public Utilities Commission, and that's analysis of phone calls. But in general, I like to work with criminal defense attorneys.

Speaker 2 (00:05:43):

What is it that drew you to that side of the legal fence?

Speaker 3 (00:05:47):

Well, so I'm from the San Francisco Bay area and it's the people, but it's also an alignment that I have toward criminal justice and protecting fourth Amendment rights and not talking to the cops, but I'm a weirdo and an artist and the weirdest, most artistic people that I know are San Francisco Bay Area criminal defense attorneys. So they just seem like a good crowd to roll with.

Speaker 2 (00:06:17):

I'm actually really interested to hear more about that because being that I know lots of artists that grew up around them, and I mean artists of all mediums, musical artists, visual artists, for the most part, they tend to have a sense of, I don't want to say anti-authority, but let's just say anti-authority. And a lot of them do tend to have this, don't talk to the cops mentality, but that's where it ends. They don't turn that into a career because they're more interested in making their own music or their own art. I guess they don't feel passionate enough about the justice and all that to actually pursue it. But what I think is really fascinating is that you combine both the passion for audio with an innate sense of justice and turn that into a career basically.

Speaker 3 (00:07:25):

Yeah, sometimes it's about the justice and sometimes it's just about answering questions for money. I am,

Speaker 2 (00:07:33):

Well, you got to do what you got to do.

Speaker 3 (00:07:34):

You got to do what you got to do. But also to some degree, living a certain type of creative life can be a valve of poverty, or you can go out there and employ your creative energy to go sell somebody else's shit, or you can just dig into the work, which is what I've been doing for quite some time. And so I'm really interested in, I've almost had a lifelong interest in digital audio computers, computer music and computer recordings. So I got super into DSP and that kind of led me to where I am, where I found myself at a job where a lot of the clients were lawyers and I've had this skillset for audio processing and at some point in time those things were going to integrate.

Speaker 2 (00:08:35):

So when you say that the clients are lawyers, what does a typical client ask of you? A lawyer's coming to you, what do they need from you?

Speaker 3 (00:08:45):

It varies. Sometimes they need the answer to the age old question, what did my guy say? So they have a recording and their client's been captured by that recording or their voices have, and sometimes it's intelligibility improvements, sometimes it's authentication. Is the story of this recording accurate? And

Speaker 2 (00:09:11):

What types of recordings are they wires that somebody wore or just a random phone call that happened to be recorded or

Speaker 3 (00:09:22):

Yes,

Speaker 2 (00:09:22):

Yes. Okay. All the above.

Speaker 3 (00:09:25):

I get a lot of eight K mono telephony. I get voice memo recordings, audio associated to body mounted cameras like axon, taser, flexes, iPhone recordings, nine one one recordings, nest security recordings, digital portable audio voice memo, literally anything that can record, which is most objects seem to now be able to record

Speaker 2 (00:09:59):

Even if you don't know they can.

Speaker 3 (00:10:00):

Correct. Yeah, so the types of recordings, it's kind of all over the place. But then I do get a lot of audio that's delivered via video. And so video is sometimes what the lawyer's focusing on or what the client, I've got this video, right, can you take a look at it? And sometimes taking a listen to it or extracting the audio from it can give you a lot more valuable info than what the images show.

Speaker 2 (00:10:32):

Is it because the images can sometimes be very grainy, hard to make out,

Speaker 3 (00:10:38):

Or 15 frames per second versus 8,000

Speaker 2 (00:10:42):

Or

Speaker 3 (00:10:43):

Any number of things including the non-recorded portions of that file's existence, like the containers and the headers and the XF metadata and the file properties and things like that as well.

Speaker 2 (00:11:00):

So walk us through, okay, and this understanding that there's no typical day, it sounds to me like you get all different types of media with all different types of cases, but if you had to think of a typical situation or just think of one situation that sticks out where you're given files and you have to decipher them for an attorney, what does your day look like? How does it start? What types of tools are you using?

Speaker 3 (00:11:38):

Sure.

Speaker 2 (00:11:39):

How do you dig in?

Speaker 3 (00:11:40):

So a typical day will be I get a phone call or an email and it's either somebody I know or somebody who found out that they needed a service that I can provide and they'll give me a file. So we could use one very specific example. So criminal defense attorney has a recording that was a voice memo recording and they have it on an iCloud storage, and they tell me that there's this recording of my client. And my client was, he was arrested and put into a holding cell, read his Miranda rights, had not been processed and had not done his intake at a jail facility. And somebody outside of that cell was recording with an iPhone. And it's kind of difficult to hear what my client was saying. And even worse than that, several months ago, without recognizing the value of it, I stipulated to a transcript that the government made

Speaker 2 (00:12:55):

In layman terms, he was admitted to jail improperly.

Speaker 3 (00:12:58):

No, he was put into jail properly and he was recorded and there was a transcript made from that recording that the defense attorney looked at and agreed, yes, I agree that this is a transcript of the recording and I'm not contesting your perception of that recording or the words that you typed. And so he gives it to me and I accept the file, and then I note that file's properties, the dates modified, I create an MD five check sum, like a hash value, and then I take notes of who sent it to me, what case it's involved with, and then a brief description of the information that was related to me by the client. And then I start doing the basics of examination, which are first and foremost in this case it's a computer file more importantly than anything, including the fact that it's a recording or an audio recording. So I take a look at that computer file and I examine it and I try to determine is this in the form that it was given to me consistent with a recording that came off of the device that they purport it to come from? And it turns out

Speaker 2 (00:14:23):

Interesting,

Speaker 3 (00:14:23):

Yes, it has the right type of header, it has the right frequency response, a bit depth, everything looks like a standard audio coming off of a iPhone six, and it looks like a second generation. The dates modified were after the date that it was created, and there's a iCloud hyperlink in the footer of the recording such that if you were on a Mac and you right click get info, you would see the actual link from where it came from. So it's not the same thing as a native source file that exists on the phone in its native state. But other than that, everything checks out that this is what the attorney was told. So the story of this checks out, and then I take that recording

Speaker 2 (00:15:24):

Real quick. So the reason that this is important is because sometimes I guess is there a historical precedence for people, defense attorneys being given, I guess doctored files?

Speaker 3 (00:15:41):

Well, it doesn't necessarily even have to be as far as doctored. It can be forensically unsound, and the reason for that is less interesting, but there's an extreme importance placed on the chain of custody and the lifecycle of something that you wish to become evidence. So I'll give you an example. If you were going to go record something, you might hit record and then put your phone in your pocket and then take a drive and then have that consensual recording where you have a conversation that becomes relevant, you leave, and then you turn it off and you realize, oh, I don't need this hour long recording. I need this 11 minute conversation, but I didn't want to be fumbling with my phone. So imagine in your mind you're not super tech savvy, but you know that you've got GarageBand and it might be higher quality than editing it directly on the voice memo app.

Speaker 2 (00:16:48):

Got it.

Speaker 3 (00:16:49):

So something like that, or it could be I was provided with this recording, is this recording complete in its entirety or is there evidence that this was a portion of a larger recording? If so, should I go about the business of asking for that larger recording or there's a thousand reasons why something might not be tampered with, but also might not be consistent with a native source material? It might not be consistent with having come from that device. So if you uploaded it to the cloud and it transcodes, or if you file save in some program that's not, that the file isn't resulting in a format that's identical to the raw material is just the same as if you took these podcast recordings and then put it into audition or pro tools or something, then the result of that would be an export that's inconsistent with the original source material. Got

Speaker 2 (00:17:52):

It. But in this example that you're explaining, that's a pretty benign reason. You're taking a source file that's an hour long with maybe 45 minutes of bullshit and cutting it down to 15 minutes so that people don't have to sit there through 45 minutes of bullshit. So that's a benign reason, but are there ever malignant reasons for why this could be changed?

Speaker 3 (00:18:19):

Oh, of course there are. Yeah. Yeah,

Speaker 2 (00:18:21):

I'd be curious to hear what some of those are, if you can share them.

Speaker 3 (00:18:26):

Sure. One of the few government jobs that I've done, like I said earlier, involves the utilities commission where there would be, I'm trying to think of how I can word this. So a company wants to rip you off. So they call and they say, hi, is this John Smith? And if they get the answer as yes or C or any affirmative response, they might take that affirmative response and then start applying it to all kinds of questions that weren't stated on that call. So can I switch carriers on your, can I contact at t on your behalf?

Speaker 2 (00:19:08):

Okay.

Speaker 3 (00:19:09):

Can I bill you quarterly so it's clear fraud that's being done.

Speaker 2 (00:19:15):

So creating an edit that that's

Speaker 3 (00:19:17):

Right,

Speaker 2 (00:19:17):

Uses your voice and makes it sound like you're answering questions you didn't actually answer.

Speaker 3 (00:19:23):

Sure. Or prior to that it was use any voice, just go to your palette of affirmative responses and pull one at random and then throw it in. And that case specifically was interesting. It was multiple entities and there was this sort of cat and mouse game because it wasn't a criminal thing, it was regulatory. So there's these 60 and 90 day windows between responses from the company that's being investigated, and then the regulators who are investigating them. And in this case, essentially what the regulators were saying is, give us your third party verification. Like this call may be recorded or monitored. Give me those recordings so that we can make sure that you're not ripping people off because we have all these people who are saying you're ripping them off. Originally it did not take any kind of expert whatsoever to identify those as total bullshit

Speaker 2 (00:20:33):

As five different people

Speaker 3 (00:20:35):

Or as one person saying yes. And it's like the exact yes and a bad transient, your vu would pop. You don't even really have to dig too deep into a spectrogram. Sometimes things that are as comedic as the inversion of the polarity of the waveform. So just like a really hard bad edit a. And so the investigation was very simple. This is inconsistent with an original, and it's very clearly edited for the following reasons. Then they started cross fading and I think they

Speaker 2 (00:21:20):

Got better.

Speaker 3 (00:21:21):

Well, they got audacity, and at that point it became a little bit more involved. So that's one good case of a recording not being what it purports to be, and then somebody asking you to prove that for money.

Speaker 2 (00:21:41):

That brings up, just out of curiosity, I feel like if you were to play this out, it would start getting into that territory where you have to identify who is actually on a recording and verify that it's that person. How accurate is it in movies and TV shows when someone recognizes or identifies a person based on their voice, is that bullshit?

Speaker 3 (00:22:14):

It's not bullshit, but almost in every instance that I've seen, it's like this frequency analysis that happens, and then there's a list that scrolls up the right hand side of their screen and then it says match detected and starts blinking. And frequency analysis is not at all a usable way to do what they call voice prints or speaker detection or voice comparisons because as you well know, the frequency response of a voice isn't static to say words and to use your voice to make language is to modulate the frequency of your voice to go high pitched and to go low pitched. So you're not looking for any kind of patterns in how high or low pitched your voice is, and you're actually not looking at the presence of acoustic information or energy in the form of the audio spectrum. So speaker identification is kind of interesting because what you're looking at is the absence of sound.

(00:23:23):

So the voice itself, if you look at in a spectrogram rather than a wave form so that you could see the concentrations of energy they call formance, it looks like a rake is getting dragged from left to right on your screen and the distance between the, I guess in music it would be harmonics, but the distance between those solid concentrations that kind of organize themselves into bands is unique. So even as you go high or low pitched, essentially the distance between the times of the rake isn't changing, even as you make a scribbly shape in the sand, if there's one time missing, that'll show up on the impression. And so there are automated systems that can detect voices, but they tend to work better when the recording only contains a voice. So it's a somewhat manual process and it involves generating long-term average speech spectrums, and it also involves just noting the, and sometimes plotting the distance between the vocal formats. It's not at all a very visually stunning or interesting thing to look at. So it suffers from the same thing that almost every piece of technology suffers from when you have to depict it in a movie or a television show, which is like, it has to look interesting.

Speaker 2 (00:25:00):

Yeah. What I've heard about these types of movies and TV shows is that because they're focusing on a hero or two heroes and they have to get it done quickly, they have two hours to get an entire story. They basically boil down something that sometimes teams work on for long periods of time or one person works on, but manually and for extended periods of time.

Speaker 3 (00:25:29):

Sure. Did they do the same process for the entire phase of a court case, which is discovery, which is after you're arrested and before you go to trial, everyone has to gather information and then share it with each other. That entire process isn't really depicted in. It's like a DA has one folder under his arm that he just got from the detective directly who slammed it down on his desk and then stormed out or something, which is the hundreds of hours, the databases, the sorting through things, and the tagging of pertinent versus non pertinent to a certain issue. All of that work of synthesizing this large volume of information and turning it into a small amount, it's called the EDRM, the electronic discovery reference model. That entire process is completely ignored and for good reason because it's a tedious and boring process, and it involves the amount of effort that it involves is staggering.

Speaker 2 (00:26:40):

How much longer does it usually take in real life as compared to a movie? Are we talking weeks?

Speaker 3 (00:26:48):

No, we're talking months.

Speaker 2 (00:26:50):

Okay. Yeah. You can't do that in a movie,

Speaker 3 (00:26:54):

Let's say. So your guy gets rated at work

(00:27:00):

And then the next cut is your guy starting trial? No, all of that stuff is extracted. Multiple types of databases are employed, and then people are scouring through that information for inculpatory or exculpatory information depending on whose side you're on. And then they have to share that with each other. And that's actually where the bulk of my work in the criminal defense mode, that's where that comes from is the discovery process. So this came from the government, this came from my investigator. Can we compare these? Can we take all of this information and stitch together from the recordings, some better picture of the recorded event?

Speaker 2 (00:27:50):

Got it. And I think that also, in addition to the fact that it's a very complicated manual process, like you said, does it weigh on you at all that you're dealing with somebody's freedom and future? Does that hang over the whole thing? I guess

Speaker 3 (00:28:13):

Sometimes I kind of was talking about this with a colleague of mine the other day. It's like a tertiary, it's like a third level issue. So the first 15 minutes or so, it's not the exact same thing as desensitization as it relates to violent media or something like that. But there is sometimes if it's something gruesome or horrendous, which that's the exception more so than the rule, sometimes in that case you'll approach it as a human being and have feelings and make emotional and psychic analysis, and then the other 55 hours of work needs to ensue. And then you're just doing some sort of process. So when it comes to reporting and to measurements and things like that, that can be so important. Oftentimes the meaning of the larger concepts of, oh, this is a death penalty eligible case, or, oh, this involves a very young victim of violence or something like that, those can be problems, but I understand that. And then at the same time, it's like anyone else going to work? I would say dealing with forensic recordings, or sorry, dealing with evidentiary recordings as a forensic expert is probably magnitudes of volume easier than being an EMT, for example.

(00:29:53):

But there's also this tendency that we have to just make it about what are the questions being asked of me? How many male voices were present from this time to that time? Is this consistent or inconsistent with gunfire? Different questions become the focus rather than the sad state of affairs that necessitates a legal system.

Speaker 2 (00:30:22):

I guess if you were to get too caught up in that, you wouldn't be able to properly do your job.

Speaker 3 (00:30:26):

And I think that when people get too caught up in things, they're not able to do their jobs, whether you serve food or advocate for victims or it literally doesn't matter what your job is. Sometimes you just have to break it down into the steps.

Speaker 2 (00:30:47):

It's very, very true. I mean, even on being a musician or a producer, if you say that you're in a high pressure situation where you are working with a band and say, the band have one record to prove themselves on their last record didn't do well, and this record is their last chance with this label, for instance, and they all have families and they all have houses, and this is their livelihood. If this record doesn't do well, these guys are going to lose that livelihood. And that doesn't mean they're going to die or anything, they're just going to have to figure out something else. But still, that would suck if that had to go away. And so it's kind of on you and them right then in that moment doing something great that will save them from that bad situation. And if you let that get to you, you're going to psyche yourself out and not do as good of a job. So I think it's true anywhere. I think you're right.

Speaker 3 (00:31:52):

Yeah. And there's a funny situation that sometimes happens where it's like, for instance, if I'm doing a forensic transcript, which is doing transcription with the added benefit of being able to make adjustments to the recordings so that you could more easily hear it and then put those words on screen, and sometimes somebody will be saying something super gruesome, but you're actually just listening hard for when one word stops and then the next one begins, and all of a sudden you get this sensation or this idea comes to you, should I be more affected by what's being said here? And it's like, no, I'm not actually, I'm just working. So on the secondary level, I'm fine. I'm safe in my office looking at a computer screen. And then it's like, but is that mellow? Is the fact that I'm not at all sort of hyperventilating at a situation that might require hyperventilation if you're looking at it as a human being with feelings, and in that situation specifically, it's so easy just to go back to work and then to think about those things later. And I think that's a skill that every professional has to develop in the sense that there's a time in place for different modes of being, and there's a time in place for processing. There's value in processing later the emotional portion of the narrative around a case or the relationships with coworkers or band mates or anything else. It's like just try to get a sense of when should you be doing that? And it's not when you're counting frames or making notations of file signatures

Speaker 2 (00:34:03):

Or making an emergency landing.

Speaker 3 (00:34:06):

Yeah, or overdubbing a tricky rhythm. So just do that later.

Speaker 2 (00:34:12):

Is that something that you taught yourself how to do, or does it just come naturally?

Speaker 3 (00:34:17):

Sometimes the urgency of the work causes it to come naturally. You're looking at the clock and you're like, wow, it's Tuesday at 1238. We're not very far from Wednesday at 9:00 AM when I made a commitment that there would be a report done, you're just so busy.

Speaker 2 (00:34:38):

Ain't got time to bleed.

Speaker 3 (00:34:39):

Exactly. We'll sort this out later.

Speaker 2 (00:34:42):

That's one of the best lines in a movie.

Speaker 3 (00:34:44):

Where's that from?

Speaker 2 (00:34:45):

I ain't got, it's from Predator.

Speaker 3 (00:34:47):

Oh, right, right.

Speaker 2 (00:34:48):

Jesse Ventura says that I ain't got time to bleed. But it's true for so many different things. It's just if the work is intense enough and important enough, you don't have the time to worry about how you're feeling.

Speaker 3 (00:35:06):

I was doing a wrongful death case where somebody, and this is great. The term of art that was used by the opposing counsel was,

Speaker 2 (00:35:17):

What's a term of art,

Speaker 3 (00:35:19):

A term of phrase.

(00:35:21):

He failed to regain consciousness when he was in police custody. He lost consciousness and failed to regain it. But in that case, a lot of the questions that I was being asked was related to time. So it was validating the time signatures versus the onscreen display of multiple body mounted cameras where if you stitch them all together and validate using both the metadata file properties and the activity depicted on the screen to take many pieces of media and validate one overarching timeline. And the goal of that was to answer the question exactly how many minutes, seconds, milliseconds was it between when somebody was identified as not breathing and when aid was rendered to him. And the reason they were doing that is because they wanted to place liability on the idea. They wanted the idea that that was a negligible amount of time. The police did.

(00:36:38):

Their idea was we rendered aid in a timely fashion, and the plaintiff said, no, you didn't. You should have started CPI right away. And it was this amount of time between when you identified that there was a problem and when you started to render aid. And so the fact that it's a wrongful death situation, it's a supercharged emotional idea. Somebody lost their life because of a police interaction that has to kind of go away when what you're actually doing is synchronizing the movement of a left hand so that you could validate that the onscreen display of two separate pieces of media where accurate, and then comparing that to the log files of the management console that was administering all of these different recordings and backing them up, and all of these moving pieces and really sort of tricky technical questions are being asked with this really lofty, depressing sort of backstory, which can easily recede if you immerse yourself in solving the puzzle of like, did one of these have a internal time clock that was off relative to the other, or were they the same? Or am I locking the exact frame of when somebody turns to their left?

(00:38:18):

It is both a sort of a video editing challenge and an audio sync challenge, and it has almost nothing to do very quickly. It has almost nothing to do with this really emotionally charged situation.

Speaker 2 (00:38:34):

So one thing that's just coming to mind right now, hearing you talk about this, and I've thought about this before, but this just reinforces it, is I try to not have too many opinions about when I hear of an acquittal or a conviction in the news, in any situation really, whether it's a wrongful death or a murder or some politician or whatever it is, I try to not have too many opinions because there's so much work going into it that I don't see that I am completely unaware of, that the public will never know about that goes into proving or disproving this, that I don't know, how can I even have an opinion on it? It's so uninformed. And so I just think about the level of work that you're putting to verify this evidence or not verify it

Speaker 3 (00:39:38):

Or to confirm or disconfirm an assertion. Yeah, and I mean, I definitely agree that there is a lot of hidden effort, but also I get asked a lot, is it okay with you that you work with criminals? And I'm thinking, are you kidding me? At my core, I think that it does not matter what you've done, and it doesn't matter how guilty or innocent you are. Your fourth amendment rights deserve protection. So they can't lie about you falsify evidence. They have to give you your Miranda rights. They have to collect things in a sound manner that's admissible and repeatable. And if they don't do that, people aren't found innocent. There's no finding of anyone innocent. So don't break people's Fourth Amendment rights, do your job the normal right way. And then I believe that people who are accused of a crime, they should get a strong and competent defense if they did it.

(00:40:51):

It should be self-evidence and the evidence against them should be unimpeachable and people shouldn't cheat just because you're trying to catch a crook. And so most of the work that I do on behalf of criminal defense attorneys involves the ultimate question of what happened. And then they want a report that supports my opinions about what happened. And you don't come to those opinions lightly. You use standards to develop them, and then you show your work. And oftentimes it ends up correcting when people are overcharged or when they're charged in a situation that's related to leverage or it's not related to the evidence against them. And I think that for a very long time, people have assumed, and they've been correct to assume that the standards being developed by the government and the energy and research and efforts are coming almost exclusively from the government, that if you're going to defend yourself, you should have the ability to do the same sort of analysis and to get the same sort of opinions, to analyze evidence, to keep one side honest. And that's really important. And I don't see enough people in the forensics domain or in the forensics community giving as much attention to plaintiffs and criminal defense, things that are more sexy like intelligence and politics and opining about news stories and things like that.

Speaker 2 (00:42:40):

Well, I think that at least from the public perspective, I understand where the public's moral dilemma is with that whole issue of protecting criminals. But the thing that I'll always say to somebody is, what happens when your life gets turned upside down and you find yourself on trial for something you didn't do? What happens then? Are you going to want them to cut corners and get you convicted fast, some narrative in the news about you, or do you want the system to work for you and give you your shot?

Speaker 3 (00:43:24):

Or do you still have fourth amendment rights? Is it okay to cheat when investigating you? That matters, but also, I sleep just fine knowing that I've produced work product that advances the advocacy for guilty people. I sleep perfectly fine for multiple reasons. I couldn't move the needle through my efforts toward sane incarceration levels or toward to sort of balance out how many people are sitting in jail right now versus in mass how many should be. Also, I believe that an excellent defense should not be able to change the material facts about how did this come about? What is this evidence against you? And ultimately, did you do what you were accused of? You can later talk about should what you were accused of be a crime, I'm less interested in that, but I can't answer enough questions to make a guilty person innocent, but I can answer questions that illuminates deficiencies in the collection of that evidence and those aren't okay,

Speaker 2 (00:44:44):

Basically be representing Ted Bundy no matter how well you do, he's still Ted Bundy.

Speaker 3 (00:44:50):

Sure, absolutely. The question wouldn't be how do you feel about Ted Bundy? It would be, can you authenticate this audio?

Speaker 4 (00:44:57):

And

Speaker 3 (00:44:57):

It might have something horrible and it might've been excerpted and determining, measuring and then stating the qualities of that excerpt has nothing to do with whether something's been edited or not, has nothing to do with the meaning of what's depicted on that.

Speaker 2 (00:45:15):

Yep. That makes perfect sense. That makes perfect sense to me at least. And I'm really curious, how did you get into this? This is obviously something that you're very passionate about and it's interesting, passionate about being dispassionate

Speaker 3 (00:45:35):

Almost. Sure, absolutely. Yeah.

Speaker 2 (00:45:36):

But this is obviously, at least at this point, it's your life's work. But how did this come about?

Speaker 3 (00:45:44):

Well, that's a really good question. I don't quite know. So I've played in bands for years and I write music on mainly computers and other pieces of technology, field recordings and whatnot, and was really interested in DSP from my first interactions with it, but also in digital art in general. I remember in preschool or kindergarten, starting with the Apple two E, and by second grade, I was rocking the logo of Ray Tracing program, and

Speaker 2 (00:46:24):

I was a two Gs kid,

Speaker 3 (00:46:25):

Two Gs, there you go. And just totally captivated and interested in, I started making music on the computer. I think I was probably 13 years old, and that had always been something that I did as a sort of self prescribed practice. And I feel like I'm the primary recipient of a lot of the music that I make or in some ways that I'm channeling the music that I make. And I think that it's incredible music and I think that it's been sort of custom designed for one person to really engage with and think it's incredible. So to me, I've made London calling or sports or whatever your

Speaker 2 (00:47:11):

Own version for you,

Speaker 3 (00:47:12):

I've made the best record anyone could ever make, as long as they're me thinking that

Speaker 2 (00:47:17):

That's actually a really, really deep way to look at it, because I don't know, I feel like if you actually make music that's true to you, you should be doing that every time. Whether or not you should trick yourself into thinking that the rest of the world thinks that, but for you, it should be that

Speaker 3 (00:47:36):

David Lynch has a lot to say on this, and I love it. He's talking about George Lucas and he says, I conjure ideas. He says something like, I conjure ideas and my ideas make films, and I'm good at making films. And George, he conjures ideas and he makes films. And the difference between us is that his ideas generate hundreds of billions of dollars, and mine are kind of weird, and I understand that deeply, but I'm also not deceived into thinking that what I think is super powerful, important and vital music is going to have a life cycle that extends too far beyond me, especially thinking soberly about people who are legitimate musical heroes of mine. We're dealing with people who are maybe not quite even middle class individuals, and like I said before, there's to some extent this vow of poverty that happens when you want to truly follow the path to make a creative life that involves self prescribing and making art and music for yourself.

(00:48:52):

Sometimes that's incredibly culturally salient, and then sometimes it totally diminishes the joy when you start involving other people in it or sharing it with the world and not to be precious about it. I think it's actually kind of the oldest thing that we do is self prescriptive music like fiddling on the porch or going to the family piano or gathering around the radio and singing along whatever it is or scraping on the side of the cave. I think that folk music or self referential, self beneficial music is really important, and it's a missing piece to a lot of people's thought life and lives in general. I'm not deeply passionate about taking my ambient noise thing and going out and trying to monetize it or turn it into a scene of somebody else's film or having it sliced and diced and listened to in segments, in streams or anything like that.

Speaker 2 (00:49:59):

That's a crucial part of making it your career is having that passion for it being your career. It's actually, I just had someone on the podcast, Berkeley, professor Neuroscientist who she used to work with, prince, her name's Susan Rogers. I just had her on and she's really, really brilliant. And we were talking about what it is that set people like Prince apart because there are lots of talented people out there. I mean, he was super talented, but it wasn't just his musical talent. He also had this commercial sensibility and this passion for all of it. He had a passion for the career side of it too. That was just as much a part of it as the music. And I mean, the music was a huge part of it too. It's not like he was all career and not music. He was great at all of it, but all of it was important. It wasn't like he was just doing it for himself, and that's where it ended.

Speaker 3 (00:51:02):

And that's very much what I'm doing is I feel like I'm receiving this thing and that as soon as it becomes sharing it or tending to that, like you said with Prince, he was a tentative to every aspect of his life focusing on that music. And I think in my case, it tends to be this palliative. I'm not one of these shamanic music heals, but it is palliative to me. It provides a sensation that I feel better, and that can be a really important thing. It also provides, it affords this space for me to be terrified or start to occupy the part of you that isn't human or doesn't have a body or whatever it is, go into flow state or feel holiness or however you want to conceive of it. That's very much the mode. There's this reverential mode, and it doesn't work for people when I haven't put in the effort to somehow leave that state and then become its custodian.

(00:52:22):

When you see a front man, essentially what they're doing is they're saying, this is going to get X, Y, and Z, energetic, weird, soaring, whatever you want to put on it. I am the rational guide here. You are safe with, I will be directing you and I'll be manipulating your emotional states so that you are going to go on this ride. I'm not going on the ride. I'm driving you and I'm in charge. And that's what makes a good a performer, and that's what makes this evangelical almost like I have to share, this information needs to be transmitted to you.

(00:53:03):

I feel like if I'm being very honest with myself, what I'm doing is I'm trying to tune the antenna over in the corner so that I can get, I can receive, and I'm very much not in charge of it. I'm subject to it such that when I play live, I think when I'm finished, there's this look of concern that people have. And I'm like, what the fuck are you guys talking about? That was awesome. Don't be worried about me. Did you not just hear that? Right? And that kind of having that experience over and over again really solidified to me that it's like, oh, this is very much a practice that's important for me and can't go away, but it's not something that I'm at this point involving other people. It's not other people's business right now. And I'm not trying to be overly precious about that.

Speaker 2 (00:53:54):

That sounds very mature and rational and realistic. Just sorry to keep going back to another episode, but we were just talking about this. It's just so relevant. So one of the things that we also talked about was how in order to become a prince or a huge star, it's not just about making the music, you also have to be just as worried about how other people consume that music.

Speaker 3 (00:54:20):

That's right.

Speaker 2 (00:54:21):

And if you're not concerned with that part, you're going to have a real hard time making it a career. And also if other people's consumption of it isn't something that you're really in tune with or care about that much or not figuring out, or for some reason your music is just not for other people's consumption, whatever it is, that's okay. But what's important is realizing it and not getting delusional.

Speaker 3 (00:54:48):

Well, and that's the thing, it's like if you're confused into thinking if you're doing a self prescriptive, if you're making, I see this all the time, people are working harder than anyone else and they're so proud of it and they think it's the greatest thing in the world, but they're not tending to other elements. They're not helping anyone tap into what they're receiving. It might just be that you are making congratulations. You might be making the oldest most important form of music, which is the self prescriptive music. Congratulations, you've just tapped into that caveman thing. It's not bad at all. I think it's where folk, I think it's what folk music is. It's not until we started capturing recording and there's this invasiveness, I think, in consuming that type. I mean, I call it folk music, but that type of private music, and that's a different thing than music that seeks to communicate and seeks to communicate really salient, really powerful, important things. I need that. I need people out there doing that. I'm not confused into thinking that in this mode with this sound palette, that that's what I'm engaging in.

Speaker 2 (00:56:16):

Sounds like you knew that from a young age.

Speaker 3 (00:56:18):

Well, I had a big brother that was really important to me, and he's four and a half years older than me, and he's the guy who gave me all of my musical knowledge and also set me on the path of understanding that these powerful moments that I was having with just like cause and effect, it's very normal kid shit, like flicking the doorstop and watching the intervals decrease and this sort of doppler effect or getting handed weird records and just kind of scoping those out. And it started this interesting sensation that listening is this really powerful way to tap into something like just listening more and listening differently and then employing as many tools as you can to listen. That can be an interesting way to be. And so it's okay if you have different practices that fulfill different purposes. And for me, I would fear that there would be too much lost in me receiving the music that sensation would have to yield to, okay, well, how can I take this kind of abstract, noisy, dense knobs to the right ambient noise and then monetize it?

(00:57:54):

It's like first and foremost, I'm going to look for somebody to chop it up and throw it in their movie. And second, I'm going to try to get myself on as many arty noise related. I'm going to go about the work that anyone would do for any kind of music. And just the thought of that is so unappealing to me because it's such this mysterious thing at its core that the counterpoint to it is that using the same tools, employing the same technology, I can snap back to this sort of one second, one body per person analytical scientific mindset. And those modes inform each other, but they're really parallel tracks.

Speaker 2 (00:58:43):

So you're using your expertise still, you're using that same, I mean, maybe it's not the exact same creative energy, but you're using that thing that you devoted so much time to and those skills just in a different way and a way that you feel good about using day in day out and for other people. So I think that's the perfect scenario. I wish that everyone found that for themselves.

Speaker 3 (00:59:12):

And it's funny, in pursuing the audio and video forensics, I stumbled across I think the most important creative discovery of my life, which was the spectrogram. I could never in my wildest dreams compose music without it any longer because it's the only way that I really actively perceive music. It's not in the form of skew, morphic knobs that go from left to right or sliders that go up and down, or I don't perceive the creation of music in terms of sheet music or keys or strings. I literally think of it as an image, and it's infinitely scalable. You can go to different localized neighborhoods of time and frequency, and then you can make adjustments to the visualization of that spectrogram that are unique to what gold you're digging for. And so I very much introduced myself to that stuff in the context of audio analysis. But now it's incredibly important to my creative process too. And that's really interesting to me is that it's this thing that once people are introduced to extra dimensions, it really changes the way they're able to perceive of things. But I feel like I've gone native in the spectrogram and now as I listen to things in real space, I can more or less conjure their basic shapes. And that's a very satisfying thing. It's like being blind and then suddenly having the ability to see,

Speaker 2 (01:00:58):

So question I have is you have your music, you realize that it's not fit for mass consumption, nor do you necessarily even want to go down that path. You have all these analytical skills, these unique set of skills. Where does the forensic part come in? How did that even happen?

Speaker 3 (01:01:24):

So I was in bands working at copy shops, making flyers, doing that thing that we know so well, and started scanning documents. And real quick, you realize that if you want to grow into adulthood, litigation scanning is the road into that. And very quickly,

Speaker 2 (01:01:46):

How did you make that connection?

Speaker 3 (01:01:48):

It was just more money. So I had been a scanning operator for a number of years working at places like Kinko's and things like that at this point. Not going to school, making weird music with a band, but actually having more powerful moments during their smoke breaks, making strange ambient interstitial passages with the feedback in the room and whatnot. And just all about hanging out with my friends, making music with my friends, recording my friends, making art with my friends. And pretty quick, we are realizing that I need to start scanning these more expensive projects. That's all of those boxes in order to get a decent paycheck. And so the litigation scanning turned into a field called litigation support, which is scanned documents, seized hard drives. So the databases that connect imaging like scanning was the road into forensics because once you start dealing with electronic discovery and seized hard drives and scanned documents and now extracted cloud storage and emails in subpoena responses, a lot of times processing all of that stuff together, it gets lumped right in there with the scanned documents.

(01:03:11):

I had a number of years where I was doing electronic discovery and super into audio researching audio. And then eventually, I think around 2009, this case came across my desk when I was working for this electronic discovery vendor. And it was all of these incredibly poorly recorded body wires, and it was in a very specific dialect. And there were two levels of transcription happening, one by just a standard transcription service and one that was a second pass for the El Salvador and gang slang, and they're not in the business of complaining about the skateboard that the kid is going to the meetup or the fact that he's crunching and icy for a good 40 minutes of it. And I started to realize that the budgets for these transcriptions were just going out of control on these multi-defendant cases. And at this point, I'm still just totally segregating.

(01:04:22):

My pursuits just I've got this job and it supports me being able to be in bands and go on tour had this girlfriend and then wife who was a painter and a sculptor, and it was just this thing that I did. It was just a gig that I had everybody else. But real quickly, it almost sort of like this natural progression of people who were like, Hey, you have a weird recording, or if it's in some funky format, or you get this auto player XE disc and you can't double click on it and it doesn't work on VLC, can you help me out here? I don't know what I'm dealing with. And just the processing and the familiarity with the hodgepodge of recordings started to culminate in me thinking, what the hell am I doing if I continue down the path of electronic discovery and digital forensics that I'm going to be snooping through people's phones and hard drives for a living, which I have just next door to zero interest in doing.

(01:05:33):

But I love working in audio. I love handling weird transcoding problems. I love ingesting and outputting material, but a lot of it doesn't yield itself to that. A lot of it doesn't become easily understandable or just something that you could double click. So just access to lots of digital recordings that were used as evidence. Something kind of clicked in my brain and my first way in was the development of trial exhibits. So taking DVD raw DVD files with menus that you could put inside your player and use with a remote control and just transcoding those and creating snippets. Sometimes that's easier said than done depending on what kind of archaic system it comes from. So I just started to learn about what types of evidence we're out there and what am I seeing over and over again. Things like jail calls and the axon taser flex and all these different,

Speaker 2 (01:06:39):

So you basically just taught, you kind of created it for yourself. I want to point something out that's really, really cool. So the job at the coffee shops, that's something that a lot of people would consider a dead end job, and you used it to create a career. You used it to basically get to the next step and then the next step and then the next step and figure out a career that involved everything you were good at and that you're actually passionate about. The reason I'm bringing that up is because a lot of people who want to do stuff in audio or music or whatever, creative pursuit might have dead end what they consider to be dead end jobs. And I think that the problem, I mean, sometimes there are some dead end jobs, but I think the problem more is that they're not using their imagination enough and not thinking about how they can use what situation they're in to create a better future and not thinking about how it can evolve. And it sounds to me like you saw how that could be a dead end career. So then you thought about, well, how can I make this better? So that's the legal scanning, and then you thought about how to make that better and then better, and then eventually you ended up with what you're doing now is what it sounds like.

Speaker 3 (01:08:04):

Sure. And the good news for that was that in those same years as I just became, I started eating it up. I was just reading white papers and discussing it as much as I could and learning as much as I could about recorded evidence and just there were a number of just sort of mind blowing revelation. Not really revelations, but just information that you get excited about and that propels your interest. And so if there's something that propels your interest, it was counterintuitive to me just being just a kid really culturally. I was raised by my brother who's a punk rocker and super interested in sound and active listening, and started listening to weird noise and lowercase records and shoegaze creation stuff and got super into weird noises and digital signal processing. All of that is very much like, it's one portion of my thought life.

(01:09:07):

But then I didn't even understand that there was an analytic side to it. I had told myself, I hate school. The only thing important for me is making stuff with my friends. But then I learned so much and I just got so excited that it became self, it was this stumbling almost stupid path that just following your nose and then working really hard to learn because as somebody who wasn't educated at the time, I took responsibility for not being a fucking idiot. You know what I mean? The internet was starting to happen, and you could just learn anything that you want to learn and you can just call somebody who knows. You could just ask them. There was this, it was a radio lab episode where he's talking about, I think he was trying to do an episode about colors, and he's like, I need a choir that could do octaves, but there's no way we can get that. The episode's due in four days or something. And then he's like, it just hit me. You can call a choir. In my case, you can just call the person who developed the platform for this weird file format. You can just ask the person a question or you can just don't know something about it. Get the manual, look at the author, contact the fucking author. They'll be delighted and a little bit weirded out that anyone's contacting them and

Speaker 2 (01:10:40):

Bend the universe to your will.

Speaker 3 (01:10:42):

Exactly. Just you can hire a acquirer. And part of that is about curiosity, and it's about this thirst. It's like in hindsight, it looked like analysis of digital recordings. What is there to be passionate about? But as it turns out, it's an endless rabbit hole and people who are smarter than you are working on it and have been thinking deeply about it. No matter what it, no matter what niche it is, there's a road in for you. And there's, in my case, the water was warm, and when I started to seriously get into it, it was in its infancy, I'd say. It's still in its infancy, digital audio forensics. And in subsequent years, I was kicking myself as I should have fucking gone to school because now there's a master's program for what I'm interested in and have been practicing for a number of years. And so now I'm kind of kicking it into high gear and there's more things to learn, and it's fantastic. But as soon as you find that thing where there's joy in the idea that there's more things to know, and anyone who's known a drummer has easy access to that joy or a guitar shredder. It's like, oh my God, I can, there's a new technique I can try.

Speaker 2 (01:12:09):

Hey, everybody, if you're enjoying this podcast, and you should know that it's brought to you by URM Academy, URM Academy's mission is to create the next generation of audio professionals by giving them the inspiration information to hone their craft and build a career doing what they love. You've probably heard me talk about Nail the Mix before, and if you remember, you already know how amazing it is. At the beginning of the month, nail the mix members, get the raw multi-tracks to a new song by artists like Lama God Eth Shuga, bring Me The Horizon Gaira asking Alexandria Mac Machine Head and Papa Roach among many, many others. Then at the end of the month, the producer who mixed it comes on and does a live streaming walkthrough of exactly how they mix the song of the album and takes your questions live on the air.

(01:12:58):

You'll also get access to Mix Lab, our collection of dozens of bite-sized mixing tutorials that cover all the basics and Portfolio Builder, which is a library of pro quality multi-tracks cleared for use of your portfolio. So your career will never again be held back by the quality of your source material. And for those who really, really want to step up their game, we have another membership tier called URM Enhanced, which includes everything I already told you about, and access to our massive library of fast tracks, which are deep, super detailed courses on intermediate and advanced topics like gain staging, mastering loan, and so forth. It's over 50 hours of content in, man, let me tell you, this stuff is just insanely detailed. Enhanced members also get access to one-on-one office hours sessions with us and Mix Rescue, which is where we open up one of your mixes on a live video stream, fix it up and talk you through exactly what we're doing at every step.

(01:13:57):

If any of that sounds interesting to you, if you're ready to level up your mixing skills and your audio career, head over to URM academy slash enhanced to find out more. Yeah, if you don't feel the way they feel about whatever it is you're doing, then you should reexamine it. However, that depends on what you want out of life. I mean, if what you want out of life is a very balanced, very balanced life where you don't have a consuming type of job where you can focus more on hobbies and things like that, that's okay too. I think it kind of just back to what you were saying earlier about being realistic about your own music, I think you need to be realistic too, following your passion. I think it's a very, very smart thing to do if you're willing to do what it takes to bring your passion to life if you're actually willing, and that's actually something you want. I think sometimes people don't, they haven't thought it through and the reality of having to dive deep on something for years might not be in line with their actual life plan. But if it is what you want, if that's the kind of life you want, then I think you have to find that thing that gets you going. For me, it was this URM thing, which was a total surprise.

(01:15:29):

I thought I was going to be a musician, and I was into that and I kind of thought I was going to be a producer too. But when I started doing the online education thing in 2013, it got me in a way that music and production never did. I was way more motivated to make it work. For some reason I went, I've always gone to great lengths to make things work, but there was something different about this. It felt way more right and way more, I always felt like there was something missing when I was doing music. I felt like there was something missing. It was too selfish. And when I was doing production, it was cool, but I felt like there was something missing because it wasn't scalable. And so with this, it kind of combined everything and I rolled with it and it's been the most successful thing I've ever done.

(01:16:35):

And I think that it's because of, there's a few different things like got in at the infancy of online education and also very passionate about it, have all these years of expertise in music and audio and have all these connections and all that. It all works together. But if I didn't have the passion and the desire to have this kind of a career than it wouldn't have worked in my opinion. And I think it's a similar thing with what you're describing, and I think it's important for people listening who do want to do something in audio or something creative who don't see themselves being that popular producer. Or maybe that's just not the type of personality they have. You could be a very talented producer, but if you don't have the right personality for it, it might not work. There might be something else that you can do with audio that's still fucking rad.

Speaker 3 (01:17:37):

Absolutely. Yeah.

Speaker 2 (01:17:38):

You just have to do the self-work and the self-discovery part of it.

Speaker 3 (01:17:42):

For me, when I recognized that the main's hum or the 60 cycle hum had a cause and what its true expression was or what it actually meant, it was this road into this crazy amazing world of audio analysis and electrical engineering that I wasn't prepared. I didn't self conceive of my purpose involving analysis. My favorite bands are Throbbing Grisel and My Bloody Valentine and Tim Hecker, and I am not, my brother is a punk. My wife's a painter, and I'm from the Bay Area, and I'm deeply interested in deep weirdness, and I just didn't see myself as somebody who would perform analysis for a living. But then I just continue to follow my own questions, like, what's going on there? What is that about? And I realized that I not only had a knack for it, but it was if I'm paying attention, tending to my awareness of where my value is or how can I be of service, how can I help? I'm most valuable in the space of audio analysis and in video analysis as well. And that was a true surprise to me. It's really about being malleable enough to realize that something can fulfill you, even though it doesn't seem very cool or it doesn't necessarily fall perfectly in line with the mental image that you have of yourself,

Speaker 2 (01:19:27):

Which is just a preconceived notion.

Speaker 3 (01:19:29):

Yeah, that's just narratives that we're making up

Speaker 2 (01:19:32):

And that you may have made up at a really young age.

Speaker 3 (01:19:35):

Absolutely.

Speaker 2 (01:19:36):

In teenage years where you don't even know yourself yet, where your brain's not even physically totally developed yet, and you're determining your identity as an artist and a human being at that age, it doesn't make sense.

Speaker 3 (01:19:49):

I fixated, I had this strange combination. I was an extroverted loud mouth who grew up in a kind of chaotic, I guess it's like a fire hose sort of life method of talking and information coming back and forth. And the pace of my childhood life was rapid. And in the midst of that, I would fixate on things and my A DHD would manifest itself in this tunnel vision that I would have on something. And I was the kid that could, once I made a tape loop, I could play it 300,000 times. And active listening was really important. And small physics, dropping a ping pong ball on the floor, it was just this way into frequency analysis. And those types of the biggest oldest, most difficult to express thoughts that were going on in my life happened before I was given information that these things are bad, these fixations are bad, or the rapid, the speed of which I sort of spew out things that I'm interested in or stories or whatever were indicative of this kind of unsettled mind or this hyperactive mode. But in actuality, it's like my propensity to be enthused and fixated on something. Plus my intense energy was really fertile territory for spending a lot of time with a very short recording. When I'm doing intelligibility improvement projects, I've probably listened to something three, four, 5,000 times.

Speaker 2 (01:21:46):

I believe it,

Speaker 3 (01:21:47):

And I'm playing the filter game. I'm daft punking it between noise and words and just trying to find in the spectrum where does this target live and what are its harmonics and just this obsessive a being. And if that's something that you get excited about of just staying on something far past what appeared to be reasonable or profitable, that's actually my value as a person in the professional space. That's a superpower that I didn't know that I had, that I always thought of it as being related to this weirdo kind of headspace.

Speaker 2 (01:22:28):

God, just make that weirdo headspace work for you.

Speaker 3 (01:22:30):

It's a thing that I've literally turned into the best shot that I have at providing for myself, and it's the most value that I can be to people and it's awesome.

Speaker 2 (01:22:42):

So question for you. You brought something up earlier that I really wanted to ask you about because when we met at Sam Pierre's place, you talked to me about this, you just brought it up and it really blew my mind. So you were just talking about 60 cycle hum and how you learned that it meant something. And you were telling me at Sam p's place, and I'm going to butcher this, so I'm just going to try to remind you of what you were talking about so that you can say it properly, but you were talking about how the 60 cycle hum is unique to a certain timestamp worldwide or countrywide

Speaker 3 (01:23:24):

Sort of

Speaker 2 (01:23:25):

Sort of. Yeah, that's what I'm saying. I would butcher it, but you said something that blew my mind. What was that?

Speaker 3 (01:23:31):

So Maine's hum can be a couple of things, right? It can be a transmission of some type, rarely, like your pickups can start getting things from

Speaker 2 (01:23:41):

The radio,

Speaker 3 (01:23:43):

Like the radio or things that you don't understand, but that don't seem like they're noise. And then in addition to that, you could have a ground loop and we always call that main's hum, and it's just the sound of the wall or it's just this, no one really knew what it was. And as it turns out, what's happening when something picks up that 60 cycle hum and its harmonics is that the United States, and I guess every country, but let's keep it specific to the United States has three power grids and there's the east coast grid and the West coast grid and Texas gets its own.

Speaker 2 (01:24:22):

Of course Texas gets its own

Speaker 3 (01:24:23):

Right? Yeah. Like sovereign all the way.

Speaker 2 (01:24:27):

Yeah. What a surprise.

Speaker 3 (01:24:29):

I'm not an electrical engineer, but as far as I understand it, the cause of this phenomenon is something like there's substations that all get linked together within a grid and they require energy, right? So when you turn the lights on, you're asking for more energy. And so it roughly presents itself at 60 hertz, but it doesn't actually ever really stay on 60 hertz because each grid and each substation and collectively all of us have a variable rate of power consumption. So we're not always using, sometimes we're turning the lights on when the Super Bowl happens, there's a little spike when it gets hot and everyone turned their air conditioner on, there's a little spike. Well, essentially what you can do is pick up that mains, that electricity going through your wall via the wall plug and the transistors are generating that noise. And a lot of times we want to filter that noise out, but one thing that they've learned is that you can record that noise and then plot it out using the frequency response. So basically you can imagine the 60 hertz filter and then you filter its harmonics, and then there's a line that goes up and down. And what people are doing to validate the time of a digital recording is they're continuously recording 12 hours of just the wall sound of just your main's hum, and then taking, extracting that hum from a recording that originates in something that was plugged into the wall. And sure enough, there's identical peaks and valleys, there's an identical shape that gets made.

Speaker 2 (01:26:34):

So how specific is that? For instance, can you sometimes get the same shape 10 years ago on a certain date or is it like a fingerprint

Speaker 3 (01:26:44):

10 years ago is a great question. So it's more like what you were saying from before, but what you have to have is a reference recording. So this is the way it works. Let's say I'm creating an ENF, an electronic network frequency database and I've got these 12 hour recordings and I'm starting at midnight, ending at noon, starting at noon, ending at midnight. The extent to which I have access to the recordings of that main's hum, that enumerates the amount of audio that I can validate. So if my personal database goes back 10 years, then we can do 10 years. Most people only have a couple of years under their belt.

Speaker 2 (01:27:29):

So it's based on what you have your analysis is that you have on your system

Speaker 3 (01:27:34):

Someday there will be, I'm positive like archive.org, shout out an ENF global database that only records main's hums, but that day has not yet come.

Speaker 2 (01:27:47):

Got it. How would it find the main's hums from past dates? Would it just have to get it from all the people who were working on this?

Speaker 3 (01:27:56):

No, it would have to get it from validated timestamped recordings from yesteryear. So as long as something is plugged into the wall, congratulations. It is getting the main's hum.

Speaker 2 (01:28:08):

Okay. So they can get it.

Speaker 3 (01:28:10):

But what you really want for admissible and repeatable and really kosher applications of this audio authenticity inquiry is you want a good stable, solid database of recordings and then you take the recording that you were provided and you extract the 60 cycle frequency response and then you compare it to your reference database.

Speaker 2 (01:28:39):

Got it.

Speaker 3 (01:28:39):

And then sure enough, you could do this manually if you had an idea of what day you were talking about. And as long as you have several minutes, you'll see the shape snap into place. You'll create a spectrum readout and it will have an identical shape as the reference recording. And then you could say with a reasonable certainty that the recording happened on this day. But more interestingly, if there's omissions, so if there's discontinuance in that recording process, that should also show up as long as you're getting good clean ENF in a recording. So not only can it be used as a time validation tool, it can also be used to detect edits.

Speaker 2 (01:29:27):

Amazing.

Speaker 3 (01:29:28):

Because that shape will have matched before and after a certain

Speaker 2 (01:29:32):

God, you cannot hide from the future.

Speaker 3 (01:29:34):

No, you really can't.

Speaker 2 (01:29:36):

Holy shit.

Speaker 3 (01:29:38):

Here's the thing, not everything picks up ENF only things that are plugged into the wall. There's this really interesting research going on in Denver right now where people are walking around with digital portable recorders and they're getting ENF off of cast registers and the hums from lights and all kinds of televisions that are blaring. It's really bad impression of it. It's not comparable to what you would get directly from recording it from the wall, but it's this really interesting thing,

Speaker 2 (01:30:13):

But it is floating around in the air.

Speaker 3 (01:30:15):

No, but just this idea that there's this signal out there and you can take a recording from any television station, from

(01:30:25):

Any home video, especially if it's corded one, and you can make all these assertions are, you can determine something's lack of electronic network frequency. There's a famous case where the lack of stable results for ENF helped prove that the recording took place off of a generator for instance, rather than in a situation where there was power coming from a grid. And people are even extracting ENF using really high speed cameras and office lights and they're just filming a white wall at really high quality, at really fast speed. And sure enough, the tiny imperceptible fluctuations in the brightness of a light bulb were embedding ENF into the video recordings. That's wild. If you think about the implications of that in general, it's not

Speaker 2 (01:31:29):

No hiding.

Speaker 3 (01:31:29):

Yeah, no, it's not a very widely employed and to be honest, it's usually more in an advanced law enforcement or intelligence standpoint, but the fact that,

Speaker 2 (01:31:42):

Well, I mean that is who you would hide from if you were hiding.

Speaker 3 (01:31:45):

Of course, of course. It's an interesting thing though, it's just like when you start to understand a little bit more about something that just seemed like, who cares why it happens or you give no effort or energy into understanding this phenomenon and then you realize that there's a lot of meaning that can be extracted from it. And it was the same thing when I started really getting into spectral analysis. I just don't, I think I don't understand how the waveform after 1995 came to be the digital shorthand for sound as a scribbly line that tells you only how loud something is when you start to go native in understanding the spectrogram, your relationship to audio and audio recordings changes forever. And I recommend anyone who works in pro audio, whether they're dialogue editors, music producers, whether they work in movies, doing a DR spend time looking at Spectrograms and you will be blown away

Speaker 2 (01:33:01):

About Spectrograms. Admittedly, I haven't spent that much time with them, but we just put out a course on guitar called Ultimate Guitar Production and with a producer named Andrew Wade and in the guitar editing section, he uses a spectrogram to help clean up a di. And it's one of the coolest things I've ever seen. It's so powerful. I can't believe that I hadn't seen this till now. I mean I've seen them, I never saw just how deep you can go with it. I was blown away.

Speaker 3 (01:33:44):

Most of the time you can go to 48,000 plus images across the second and 20,000 values bottom to top. So yeah, you can get as deep and as detailed as you want.

Speaker 2 (01:34:03):

I know I couldn't believe what he was doing with it. It was mind blowing. So when you say that anyone who works in audio, whether they're a dialogue editor or a producer or whatever it is they do that this is a tool that they should know about. I completely back that

Speaker 3 (01:34:25):

There is literally an extra dimension available to you visually that you've been skipping. And it's the most important dimension because how loud something is secondary if it's audible, but what frequency something embodies, that's the whole game. So when you see a transient and you've got a clip on your waveform, you can use your ears. You could say, oh, that's a pretty basic clip, but that bumpy line on your timeline's not going to really tell you much about what it is. And no matter what doll you're using, no matter what audio program you prefer, almost without fail, there is some spectral readout. And not only that, but you can adjust the values and the windows and you can zoom in and out well past the sample size. So if you're thinking about, look, I went so deep as to editing the samples to get rid of my clipped audio and that's how I fixed it, you realize within that sample there's 20,000 possible values times silence to in the red. So it's literally a world without end.

(01:35:44):

But what does that mean? It means that you now have access to the full impression of what is a sound doing. And once you start to notice that, you don't even have to employ it in your workflow. It's a tool for perceiving in a visual domain what you're hearing with your ears and you allow yourself to stop using poetry essentially to talk about sound, which is the way that we've always done it. When I was in bands in high school, we called it junk language, right? We're basically mouthing ourselves. We're doing the best that we can to not just hear things, but to add a dimension to that here, to that hearing where we can discuss it and talk about it. And as soon as you see a spectrogram that's been properly presented to answer the question that you're asking, there's no amount of description that I can give it.

(01:36:43):

It's an aha moment. It's a eureka loud things can be bright and quiet, things can be dark, or you can assign any kind of color map that you want and it goes left to right and low pitches on the bottom and high pitches on the top, and it's a self actualizing display. And I've never been able to accurately match a waveform to what I'm hearing except for on a macro scale. So when someone starts yelling, you'll see a thicker shape and when things are compressed, it looks like toothpaste. You know what I mean? And that's some degree of visual analysis that you can give to a recording, but it's so flad in the face of what the spectrogram affords you. It's, I can't stress it enough. Spend time inside the spectrogram. If you're working on an album, memorize that album's shape, understand what happens when you're getting phase. You can see phase

Speaker 2 (01:37:52):

Also just an example of how Andrew was using it. He was using it to help clean up DI's for guitars that had strings ringing out that weren't intended to be hit and noise and just he was using it to completely eliminate that shit.

Speaker 3 (01:38:12):

Absolutely. I do that all the time.

Speaker 2 (01:38:13):

Yeah, it was amazing.

Speaker 3 (01:38:15):

Sometimes somebody will call and say, Hey, the headphones were a little bit too loud and you can kind of hear the base inside this guy's vocal track, but I don't want to filter it out because it kind of colors the lower registers of his voice. Well, you can see, like we talked about those vocal formance before. You can see the parallel shapes. You can see that which is not a voice, even if you can't train your ears to sort of unhear it, you can train your eyes and the tool set to remove it just by identifying it as not compliant with the shape that we're looking for, which is the guy's voice in this case, because critical listening is such a big part of my life, sometimes poor technique in a recording. I'm a notorious fret scraping cringe. I can't deal with it sounds like 10,000 little basketball players pivoting on somebody's guitar.

(01:39:17):

And I've gone about the business of fixing some albums so that I can listen to them again by making scrape list versions of songs that I prefer to listen to and you'll notice, and a lot of times these scrapes are louder than the node itself and it can just be as easy as going in there making a selection that highlights just the offending sound and then literally turning it down. You don't have to have any special magic editing chops. It's like identify that which you consider noise, turn that noise down and in its wake is left what you're looking for. And when it's music, sometimes it can be really easy to do because music concentrates itself in, you can almost see the grid that something was recorded on when you're looking at it in a spectrogram. And when I hear wooy fictive like sounds, I see swarms forming up high and when I hear a percussive click or a transient, I see these tiny broadband spires going across the entire frequency range.

(01:40:32):

And when I hear somebody's voice, I see that wobbly rake. And being able to see that is valuable in and of itself because it can inform what tools that you use, even if you ditch the spectral readout and go back into the world of fake knobs on a computer screen or hardware on your rig. Having a good foundation for understanding the spectrogram really is to kind of go native on frequency response. And my brain isn't capable of just picking up a new dimension of perception without being invited in. The spectrogram affords me the ability to pay attention to and to tend to my own awareness of frequency.

Speaker 2 (01:41:25):

That makes perfect sense. So let me tell you about a situation that happened to me and tell me how you would go about this. This was in 2005 or something. This was a long time ago. I was working with a band and one night the vocalist called me and he was like, man, I need you to check something out for me. It was really important. I was like, it's like midnight. He's like, it is really important. Can I come by? I was like, okay. So he came by and he said that he was sure that his wife was having people come in the house on a regular basis and that they were watching him. And so he set up recordings and he could swear that they were walking around the house and outside and he wanted me to help clean up the recordings so that he could prove that they were there. So I put on the recordings and they were just shitty noise and he was like, you hear that? You hear that there was nothing. There was nothing there. He was obviously being a psychopath. So I mean in that situation you may have told him to leave, but say that you were handed something like that, but it was legit. You need to identify footsteps or something and it's just, there's tons of background noise, tons of static, it's a shitty recording. What do you do?

Speaker 3 (01:42:58):

Well, the first thing I would do is talk about a retainer and try to suss out how can I best help you and can I help you? Let's assume that I can help you and you want me to take your recording. I'd probably have to restate your question on the front end. Are the sounds present on this recording consistent with footsteps coming from outside or voices from the side yard? And I would try to get as much information as I could about where was this recorded and what recorded it, and then I would determine, so

Speaker 2 (01:43:37):

It was a Walkman.

Speaker 3 (01:43:38):

Okay, so I would Oh, like a tape Walkman analog tape. Okay, great.

(01:43:43):

So now we're way back and now we're in the OG audio analysis when we're dealing with analog audio, which these are the people who my set came to replace now that everyone's dealing with digital audio, but regardless of what its format was, the best thing that I could do would be to measure that Walkman and take exemplar recordings with it. And if I have access to the actual place and I could more or less orient myself in the same way and create an exemplar recording that is consistent with the frequency response and the general gain level and make a recording that I could use as a reference recording that I could also validate, then I would start creating that reference recording on site and then I would walk around and take it back to my lab and digitize both recordings and then begin comparing those recordings.

(01:44:48):

And there's criteria that I would make for each of the recordings. So if they're both digital, that criteria would be what are their file structures, what is their file header, what kind of XF metadata exists on it, what about extended metadata, what about file properties? And then I would start going into the frequency response, like what's actually in the acoustic information or the auditory information in that recording. And then I would determine whether the recording you gave me yielded consistent or inconsistent qualities to the reference recording that I made. And that's the only thing that I could do is tell you in my opinion, and I would quantify it by saying that it was a high degree of certainty or a reasonable bold degree of professional certainty. There's different standards depending on how certain you are, but you're not saying, congratulations there were

Speaker 2 (01:45:50):

Men in black, were at your house,

Speaker 3 (01:45:51):

Men in black were at your house and I certify that someone was outside your house and I sign it and I sell you that report. That doesn't happen because that's not admissible and repeatable and that's not good science.

Speaker 2 (01:46:05):

And I think that's what he was hoping for too.

Speaker 3 (01:46:07):

So what I would do is say I created this exemplar recording, I stomped around, I spoke at this distance from the recording at this location, and I'd write it all down, I'd make notes and then I'd preserve those notes and then ultimately I would render an opinion as to whether I think the recording you gave me is consistent with my reference or is inconsistent with it. And if it was inconsistent with it, I would tell you that and then you would really find no value in my report.

Speaker 2 (01:46:41):

That's way too scientific for this guy.

Speaker 3 (01:46:43):

Yeah,

Speaker 2 (01:46:43):

This guy just wanted me to tell him that the government was at his house running operations.

Speaker 3 (01:46:51):

Then he needs a professional that has a different expertise than forensic audio,

Speaker 2 (01:46:56):

Like a psychiatrist

Speaker 3 (01:46:57):

That could be one or even just a friend to talk to who would maybe help. But that actually the psychology component of what I do was valuable in a way that I did not in the outset perceive. So if you're advocating for a client and let's say you've got this guy and he was caught doing X, Y and Z, and the government turns over in discovery recordings of him doing that, that either need new context so that you can re-understand them in a way that's not very incriminating for him, or you might hear from him in his mental state that they can do anything these days. That was two different meetups. They stitched it all together to make me sound bad. I wasn't even there. They got a voice actor. There's all different places that your mind can go in a paranoid state or even just with insufficient rest that it can be valuable to say, I'm your advocate, I'm on your side and because you told me things, those words have impact in the world. And I got this expert and he took a look at it and he says that this is consistent with an unedited original recording and therefore in his opinion, with a high degree of certainty, this is what it purports to be. And so we need to get right with that and then all of a sudden there's credibility there that, oh my god, when I say something to my lawyer, he takes me seriously so I should stop telling him bullshit.

(01:48:41):

And so them paying me money to do that dispassionate forensic analysis, what do I know? This could be edited material. I don't have opinions going into a job. I have opinions once I turn my report in once I do the job. So it's not my business to scoff at the validity of a question that I'm being asked. It's my job to determine whether my answer can be helpful to you. And I don't even know that in many cases. Sometimes I'll turn over work product and I'll have no concept of what is or what is not valuable to someone and they might say, oh my god, this changes everything. That tiny detail matters, that door shutting matters or whatever it is that I've come to including, yeah, this recording checks out in your guys crazy. That matters too because it helps an advocate kind of have that come to Jesus moment with their client that they're willing to pay me to help provide.

Speaker 2 (01:49:43):

Great answer. Alright, so we've been on for a while. I don't want to take up all of the rest of your day and we have quite a few questions.

Speaker 3 (01:49:50):

Cool. Let's do it

Speaker 2 (01:49:51):

From listeners. So I want to just get a few of these in. Alright, first question is from Daniel Majeski, which is sometime ago my friend and also a good client asked me to help with the recording made with a weak phone microphone camera to use the material in court or at least check if it was usable. I tried some EQing noise removal and whatever I had at the time, but the quality was so poor that I barely could understand anything, although the voice itself was quite audible. What process would you recommend to apply to get the most from a recording like this as I don't do stuff like this professionally, what can you recommend as a minimal software requirement to do it well?

Speaker 3 (01:50:38):

So you've got audible recordings that are not intelligible. The first thing that you want to do is open it up in a spectrogram and get a good picture of what's going on with the voice and what's present in the recording that isn't the voice. Then sometimes denoising and de reverbing can be really valuable, but the actual solution is going to be completely dependent on what makes it intelligible. And that's not always commensurate to what an audio engineer is trying to do, which is make it sound good or balance it. We're not looking for good sounding and balanced material. In my experience, the lower three or four vocal foreman are often garbage because of the amount of interfering signal that's present in them. So if there's going to be noise that decreases intelligibility, it's going to be on the lower end of the spectrum. So a lot of times sub 100, just brick wall EQs, just totally get rid of that loud humming can be very valuable.

(01:51:55):

And then something like the waves tools, the noise removal can be valuable when you have a decent amount of interfering audio with the lack of a voice. So if you've got static that's coming, if you get a good two, three seconds of noise with no signal in it, a lot of times denoising modules can be really helpful like waves like isotope. Now the RX advance is a pretty hefty expense for somebody who's doing this casually. It is getting increasingly better at denoising, but oftentimes people overfocus on background noise removal when they're dealing with intelligibility improvements. And sometimes it can be something just as easy as very specific and very metered EQs. And in general, turning things up is not the road in to intelligibility improvements. It's almost always turning things down and removing signal that you don't want rather than trying to boost anything. But the ultimate arbiter of is something intelligible or not is going to be the people that you play it for, which is often if it's an evidentiary hearing, it's a judge or sometimes it's 12 of your peers on a jury.

(01:53:32):

So sometimes if you've gotten something to where you are happy with the intelligibility with it or you feel that the intelligibility has been improved, I did not perceive the voices before and I do now. Sometimes additional layers of information unrelated to your audio work are important, like creating a transcript, like making that synchronized transcript video as an exhibit where basically you're making a karaoke video where the word is uttered as you say it. If you're unable to get it to the point of intelligibility, then you need to, after a preliminary assessment, go back to your guy, your client, your friend, whoever it is, and tell them intelligibility improvements are basically not going to happen. There is no magic enhance button here or kick it up the chain to some of the gurus who are just like next level intelligibility improvement audio enhancement specialists which do exist.

(01:54:42):

And a lot of times they're the same guys that fix expensive takes so that you don't have to get some A-list celebrity back into the A DR. It's the same skillset of finding a voice, removing that which is not a voice, but there's no shortcut. But if you're not getting good clear formance in your spectrogram that have good clear separations between the background noise, then you're going to have to go in there and carve them out with gain and it's not fun and it's not for the faint of heart. And a lot of times people attenuate and color the audio with heavy handed processing that does not, at the end of the day increase intelligibility. So it's about using the right tools and making small changes all the time and being able to go back and forth between them and not committing too heavily to too much processing. But yes, waves and isotope are both also, I mean if you can afford it, Cedar's not bad either, but we're not talking about denoising in audacity. I haven't tried in Reaper, but who knows?

Speaker 2 (01:55:55):

No, the isotope stuff is great. So alright, here's a question from Bobe or Shell. Let's say there's a fight caught on a cell phone video and you can hear a person holding the camera yelling, kill them or something like that. How accurately can you confirm who the person is yelling and how would you do it? What are the indicators you'd look for?

Speaker 3 (01:56:14):

I would look for indicators that the voice present on the recording is consistent with a validated recording. So acquiring an exemplar of that person saying kill him is the best possible thing that we can get. Absent that we can do voice comparison analysis of recordings of that person and we can say that the validated sample that we know to be that person is consistent with the recording that we have here. There's other things that we could try to do, which is we could try to establish that the person who yelled kill them was in fact at a place and present for that recording. So just because somebody's device is recording something and you hear a voice that appears to be their voice that tells you exactly that, but you can't jump to the conclusion that that person was there absent other information. So did somebody see him there? Do you have any reason to believe that he wasn't? Things like that. And we're compiling all of this information, which informs our opinion, but the basic answer to your question is to get a good exemplar reference recording that you can compare to that way it's not up to you and your magical ears to say that kind of sounds like the same guy, but it's about trusting the measurements that you made that they're repeatable and ultimately that they'll be admissible.

Speaker 2 (01:57:53):

Great answer. Alright, this is another one from Bob Elle, which is, he says somewhat of a joke question, but what is the program that is most like the ones on TV where they keep hitting enhance on a ransom phone call to figure out where the call is coming from based on background noises in the call?

Speaker 3 (01:58:13):

The most? Like those?

Speaker 2 (01:58:14):

Yeah, if there is one.

Speaker 3 (01:58:16):

Okay, so I can't answer that specifically, but if you're talking about gati and outlandishly showy visualization of an audio file, I'd say the cake has to be, or that prize has to be given to Sony for their somewhat ill-advised foray into audio analysis and professional audio, which is, I think it was called Spectra Layers. And essentially it makes a three-dimensional spectral readout that you can change the access of it basically models a spectrogram almost like the 3D spectral crawl in ozone or some awesome screensaver from an EDM DJ or something. And it's laughable because in order to make those three dimensional peaks and valleys, the peaks are often purposefully obscuring those valleys so that you can get a three dimensional readout and it looks damn cool and has almost no functional use. And so the lack of that functionality is consistent with all of those cool enhanced sequences, which I love.

Speaker 2 (01:59:29):

Well they look great.

Speaker 3 (01:59:30):

Yeah, they look great, but they look even better if it's not like a nerdy bey white dude. But if you're like a goth girl with a kick ass briefcase and that has blue undulating lights and cool beeping sounds, that's next level.

Speaker 2 (01:59:50):

So that's not how it really is weird. So, alright, here's one from Eduardo Pandora, which is what kind of studies would I have to take to get into this type of work? And also what's the hardest kind of audio you've had to clean?

Speaker 3 (02:00:06):

Those are all great questions. So let's assume it's today and it's 2019 and you're trying to get into this field. I'd say the first thing that you want to do is have some basis for business and a good understanding of what a sort of freelance life is. Because at present audio forensic examiners are not in-house and they're not, unless you want to go work for the government via dios, but if you're trying to do what I'm doing, which is audio analysis for criminal defense attorneys, oftentimes you are going to be either for working for a small firm or freelance getting appointed or retained work. And so that's number one, which is think clearly about what the gig life is. And then the first thing that you're going to want is not go to mastering school or go over to expressions and learn about Ableton. That's not the answer.

(02:01:12):

The answer is to get into acoustics and computer programming, learn about MATLAB and verse yourself in it, and then get a computer science degree or a degree in acoustics, actually acoustics. Or some people opt to do undergrad in the field of audiology and phonetics and things like that. And then there is a program in Denver at Denver, the National Center for Media Forensics. They've already graduated a couple of classes. It's super exciting and you can get a specific degree now finally, thank God in audio and video forensics or in media forensics. And so Denver and Catalent rigorous is the guy who runs that program and he's like Gandalf plus Yoda and he's the guy. And then you can find oftentimes there will be only one or two audio forensic professionals in any given area, and it's about glomming on to them and extracting info and geeking out and learning.

(02:02:28):

But there is a community developing and there's young kids coming up under us and I'm very excited about that because it's more people, better white papers, more weird techniques and tactics and tools to learn. And so the extent to which people get interested in it and engage in it, it's a pretty wide open right now for anyone to walk into if you have the interest and the obsessive sort of attention to detail that's necessary to do this work. And a good place to start, if you don't want to go to school, that is okay if you are from America, your government has the NIST, the National Institute of Standards and Technology, and there's a subcommittee called the Scientific Work Group for recorded evidence and they are the guys arguing about and then authoring the white papers from which we will all work. And we're in the process currently of developing the best practices and the appropriate methods.

(02:03:44):

And so that stuff is open, it's available to you. And the fact that there is a National Institute of Standards and Technology, you should find that to be very exciting because that's all of the information that you're going to get. And then if that's too in the weeds and you're more of a musician than an instrument maker, that's totally fine as well. Go get all of the tools, go learn about DSP, get familiar with matlab, get familiar with isotope, just make a lot of poor quality reference recordings, edit them and then try to detect that edits and then read the work of other people who are doing this. Join the Audio Engineering Society and the subcommittee on audio forensics. I'm going to Porto for the conference on the subcommittee of audio forensics next month. I'm super excited about that.

Speaker 2 (02:04:43):

That's sick.

Speaker 3 (02:04:44):

There is a subcommittee of a ES for this stuff and those people know what they're talking about and there's a lot of academics and a lot of researchers, and there's guys with patents from nasa. I'm more of a sewer rat in that field because I'm out there answering my phone, taking cases, writing reports, getting deposed and doing expert witness testimony day in and day out. I absolutely need the academics in my ecosystem, but you don't have to be one to do this work. What you have to do is make yourself valuable and then develop a way to make admissible and repeatable work that answers questions. And if you can do that, then you can find your way in audio forensics. And it's crazy exciting. There's not really the type of gatekeeping that other fields seem to have because it's a self-selecting niche

Speaker 2 (02:05:39):

And probably also because it's so new.

Speaker 3 (02:05:41):

Yeah, that's right.

Speaker 2 (02:05:42):

At least the way it is now, getting in on the ground floor,

Speaker 3 (02:05:45):

The fact that I've been doing this as long or longer than the available tools is really great. But also the fact that in the analog domain, people had been already focused on this work and they've developed best practices that persist even as we've changed the method that we're recording things. So if you have a real tore tape or a micro cassette, I'm going to digitize that. There are people probably out there still who are more qualified to analyze that stuff. But now that the digital recordings are commonplace as far as recorded evidence is concerned, if you are the type of guy who would obsess about getting the bleed out of your drums, then you are the type of guy that would excel at intelligibility improvements. You have to be impervious to repetition.

Speaker 2 (02:06:40):

Yeah. So I always said that it takes a certain type of person to be able to listen to one song over and over and over and over and over again, but I think it takes even more of a niche person to do that same thing, but with 20 seconds of audio. Yeah,

Speaker 3 (02:06:59):

Absolutely.

Speaker 2 (02:07:00):

Yeah. Like you said, it's self-selecting one from Nathaniel Garza, which is there anything you can't do to an audio clip because it would make it not admissible in court or would elicit reasonable doubt in a jury that your average person would normally think is okay, turning

Speaker 3 (02:07:19):

Things up. You don't turn things up, you don't introduce new signal that wasn't there before. You only turn things down when you turn things up. You have to document it and note it. And you can never purport to be playing something that's a native source material if it's not. So your work product is not evidence, it's your testimony. That's evidence. So if you ever produce something, if you sweeten something, if you make it sound better, get rid of the hvac, then that needs to be disclosed and it can't be produced as if this were the native source material. Besides that, most of the time the evidence is the bad recording that was given to me, and then the new evidence that we produce is my opinion as an expert witness. And it's for the jury to decide or the judge to decide what that evidence is and what it purports to be and whether they have the same opinion after they've seen both versions or whether their opinion has changed. So turning things up, like if it's too loud, turn it down is okay. If it's too quiet, turn it up, starts to enter the realm of tampering.

Speaker 2 (02:08:45):

Got it. Alright. Here's one from OV vain, which is how difficult is it for someone to forge an audio recording and do such a good job that it could be used as evidence in a court of law?

Speaker 3 (02:08:59):

It's easier than you would assume.

Speaker 2 (02:09:02):

Figure the better you are, the easier it is,

Speaker 3 (02:09:04):

The better that you are, that easier it is. So oftentimes when you're trying to make a convincing edit, you're lying about the life cycle of that recording more so than the content of the recording. So inconvenient portions of a recording are often excerpted and there's all different kinds of ways to excerpt that stuff. And if you're doing this well and you're effectively trying to evade my detection, you're going to keep in your mind what is the story of this file, not just of the recording that's on the file, but the actual file itself. What is its file structure? If you open it up in a hex editor, what is its header? What information could have been introduced through my editing that I'm unaware of? Recompression is something that can be detected. You have to pay attention to little things like how many channels are present on my recording?

(02:10:11):

Am I turning in a doctored 44 1 K stereo recording that purports to be a telephone conversation because if so, then I should be sending in a mono eight bit GSM and not a PC M wave, things like that. So oftentimes people cross fade nicely and they listen to their edits and continue to doctor the recording until they're sufficiently as an attentive listener persuaded that this is kosher and there's nothing wrong. That's the minimum baseline that you're going to do is you're going to get that seam out of it. Then you're going to open it up into a spectrogram and you're going to analyze what are the properties of this. You're going to look at the bit depth of it. You're going to see is there anything in this recording inconsistent with the original. A little thing that people don't know when they're compressing audio is that if you're producing an MP three, not only do you get that frequency compression, that little bump that you can see up in the higher ranges past 10 K, that degradation, but you're also going to get what are called zero points complete silences for fractions of a second at the very beginning of them, like 500 samples or something like that.

(02:11:36):

And if we're doing 8,000 or even worse, 44 1, then those 500 samples are going to be imperceptible to the viewer. But if you're dealing with a digital audio recording, there should be no zero points. So if you see anything that doesn't contain any frequency response, it didn't come from a recording, it came from a process like a computer process. So these are things that doctoring audio engineers aren't necessarily thinking about and would be wise to think about if they're trying to evade detection is not only the audio response of the material of the acoustic material or auditory material captured on that computer file, but how it exists as a file as well. And sometimes that can be a road in it is like, man, I made that edit sound real good, but I didn't know that I was introducing these detectable artifacts that were unrelated to the sound.

Speaker 2 (02:12:42):

Got it. Alright, last question. I just think this one's, we haven't covered this too much and I just think it's good. This will round things off nicely. This is for people who actually want to go into this field, the realities of it. So this one's from Daniel Bush and he says, how do you, or does anyone sustain income from this work? IE do people seek you out because you are the guy or do you have a network of repeat clients? Does the government pay? How does that work?

Speaker 3 (02:13:19):

Yes, absolutely. All of that. So I can only speak for myself and how I've done it and could show somebody how to do it. Now, I'm positive that if you joined the military and had a deep rooted passion for audio analysis that you could find gainful employment and make yourself very, very valuable. I have just right at zero interest in any of that or really working for the Department of Justice or anything like that. Oftentimes those are the guys cross-examining me. So assuming that you're one of the very small minorities, so every time I go to a training course or engaged at all with the forensics community, there's a couple of kind of flashy, wacky guys out there trying to get as much press coverage as possible. And then there's quiet guys who don't talk about fight club or what agency they're with. And then there's the defense guys, and that's what I am really, and we do two different types of work.

Speaker 2 (02:14:32):

Fight club. Amazing.

Speaker 3 (02:14:33):

Yeah, you don't talk about it, right? What job?

Speaker 2 (02:14:37):

Oh, okay, got it.

Speaker 3 (02:14:40):

You don't talk about fight club information comes to me and not from me. And they're great. They pay very close attention to the workshops and whatnot. But for me, I haven't so far really done a lot of advertising because I need to manage the amount of work that I do and make sure that I'm doing good work and there's only one hour per hour that I have available to me. I run a pretty small operation that's like one to four people at most. But as far as sustainability is concerned, there's two different roads in. And one type of work is appointed work where your boss or the people who actually hire you are the courts and appointed work comes when I work with a lot of panels. And so there's a federal public defender. And in the instance of a multi defense, when there's a lot of guys, like a whole gang of people get arrested, there's a conflict where you can't have one public defender representing all of them because their interests might not all align, right?

(02:15:55):

Some of them will snitch, some of them didn't do it, some of them did. And because of these different incompatibilities, then they should have different advocates. So what happens is the US government through the Criminal Justice Act, or sometimes through contracts with local counties and cities and whatnot, they hire private defenders. They hire pay lawyers to do court work. When you get arrested, it says, if you cannot afford an attorney, one will be provided to you. I work and come as a package deal with the one that will be provided to you sometimes. And because of that, a lot of times it's indigent work and you get a lower rate. It's not like the awesome retained work that you get from private companies, but what you get from that is stability. And you get a treasury check from the court itself and you get a court order that says, Brian shall be paid X, Y, and Z, and he shall turn this work in and you will get your money. And unfortunately for that retained work, that money comes in the form often of a check from the Bar association or from the treasury. And so you're literally to get paid sometimes waiting for a tax return check. It's a drag, especially when the government shuts down and then you start worrying about money.

Speaker 2 (02:17:23):

Wait, so your clients aren't the ones paying you?

Speaker 3 (02:17:26):

No, no. In retained work, your client appoints you.

Speaker 2 (02:17:31):

Ah, okay.

Speaker 3 (02:17:32):

So they say, I'm Brian, I've got my client and I want to appoint you as a audio forensic expert and judge, this is why I need it. This is why it's important for me. And the problem is is that the HVAC was on and I need to know what my guy said. And the judge says, approved like Brian shall clean this recording up, he shall produce a transcript and turn it over to the defense. It is so ordered. And you get that insurance policy of knowing that there is literally a court order that says you will get paid. But the problem with it is that you don't know when that's coming because sometimes you're waiting for a damn treasury check. And so the court is your client, but the person that you're talking to and working on behalf is a appointed attorney. And just like that attorney, you are appointed.

(02:18:25):

And they do this because they get appointed to the panel. And that's like a lot of times it's in line with their policies and their politics that they do a certain amount of pro bono work and they do a certain amount of appointed work. But then there's this entire other world out there that deals with referrals and direct payments of retainers, and that's the private retained work. And so you need a healthy balance of the private retained work that can be lucrative, and you don't necessarily know when it's going to be coming, but the more help that you are to the more attorneys, the better the outcomes of the cases that you work, the more retained work that you'll get. And that tends to be more stable once you've gotten the job. But the retained work tends to come in, fits and starts. So I get more steady projects from appointed work than I do retained, but the retained work is more lucrative, if that makes sense.

Speaker 2 (02:19:35):

Got it. Yes.

Speaker 3 (02:19:36):

And so getting yourself to the point where you have a steady diet of that, it will necessitate a willingness to make a file format conversion or help somebody with their disc or help somebody access even a recording from some weird system from some pole cam or security, ancient Panasonic auto player. And so becoming helpful to attorneys who don't have access to their recordings, that's money in the bank because if you allow them access, then they're going to be reviewing their discovery and then they're going to ask you questions about it. And that's where work generates from. Is your ability to be helpful as it relates to recordings. So steady diet of appointed and retained work. A lot of hustle,

Speaker 2 (02:20:33):

Be of value as with everything,

Speaker 3 (02:20:36):

And don't necessarily, I'm not out there doing a lot of advertisements and asking for a lot of paid work. There's good money in public facing forensics companies, but in my experience, the people who are out there hungry for it in public are often looking to work on behalf of the media where they're making assertions that aren't necessarily bound for the court of law. But that's really good money, apparently, and that's not what I'm interested in doing. And I definitely don't want people to just call me out of the blue and ask me questions about their recordings because I don't have as much confidence that those people are legitimate clients. And then B, your lawyer can find me. And that's kind of the way it's worked for me. Other people might have different approaches, but I really do focus on word of mouth retained work, and then court appointed work to augment that.

Speaker 2 (02:21:46):

I can confirm that talking heads get paid real well. I know that for instance, CNN or Fox or whatever, any of those news networks, they put these people on retainer, a yearly retainer basically, and it's their expert experts from all different kinds of fields. Intelligence expert, forensics expert, all that. And the pay is six figures for that. If you're one of their regular people, I know of one person who is a friend of somebody I know he does this for one of the networks. He gets 300 grand a year to just appear for five minutes when they need him

Speaker 3 (02:22:33):

And opine on whenever the next Trayvon happens or whatever it is. Yeah,

Speaker 2 (02:22:38):

Whatever it is. And

Speaker 3 (02:22:39):

That's a way to do it, and I think it's especially distaste. I have an allergy to it when people identify themselves as experts, because I don't know about other fields, but in my field, in the field of audio forensics, the only person who qualifies you as an expert is a judge. So you don't call yourself one. You are deemed to be one when somebody looks at you

Speaker 2 (02:23:07):

In that situation.

Speaker 3 (02:23:08):

And so I'm not out there as an expert. I'm out there as an examiner.

Speaker 2 (02:23:12):

Got it. It's a good distinction.

Speaker 3 (02:23:14):

So when you find somebody who calls themselves an expert, they're looking for private clients and to talk to the news, and that's okay. I am not here to knock anyone's hustle, but those aren't the same guys active with the scientific work group, reading the white papers, following the leads.

Speaker 2 (02:23:35):

It's a different career and

Speaker 3 (02:23:36):

It's a different practice as well.

Speaker 2 (02:23:38):

All right. Well, Brian, I think this is a good place to finish it off, but thank you for coming on. Yeah,

Speaker 3 (02:23:46):

Of course. Thank you

Speaker 2 (02:23:46):

For taking the time. It's been awesome talking to you. I'd love to have you back on in a year, year and a half once, and just see how things are going.

Speaker 3 (02:23:57):

Absolutely. At that point, I'll be a new dad and probably still kind of keeping on, but there's a couple of advancements that I'm really looking into. At some point I would like to talk, we didn't even get into the larger questions of authenticity and or the incoming onslaught of deep fakes and things like that, which is all super interesting.

Speaker 2 (02:24:22):

I would love to talk about that. So yeah, next time you come on, we will talk about that stuff. And then whatever advancements you've made and yeah.

Speaker 3 (02:24:31):

Yeah.

Speaker 2 (02:24:31):

Awesome. It'll be great.

Speaker 3 (02:24:33):

Well, thanks for having me. I really appreciate it.

Speaker 1 (02:24:35):

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