Alright, cable company got me back in business this evening. I'll paste what I said about Mr. Owen from another thread here so it's easy to find, then I'll detail the FBI report. I still haven't done much research on Mr. Primeau.
I'm not certain if this has been mentioned, but according to Mr. Owen's website his voice comparisons are bunk.
Website:
http://www.owlinvestigations.com/article1.html
Specifically:
Tom Owen's Website said:
III - THE METHOD OF VOICE IDENTIFICATION
The method by which a voice is identified is a multifaceted process requiring the use of both aural and visual senses. In the typical voice identification case the examiner is given several recordings; one or more recordings of the voice to be identified and one or more recorded voice samples of one or more suspects. It is from these recordings the examiner must make the determination about the identity of the unknown voice.
The first step is to evaluate the recording of the unknown voice, checking to make sure the recording has a sufficient amount of speech with which to work and that the quality of the recording is of sufficient clarity in the frequency range required for analysis. The volume of the recorded voice signal must be significantly higher than that of the environmental noise. The greater the number of obscuring events, such as noise, music, and other speakers, the longer the sample of speech must be. Some examiners report that they reject as many as sixty percent of the cases submitted to them with one of the main reasons for rejection being the poor quality of the recording of the unknown voice.
<snip - read all of the information, please>
According to his very first step he could not make such an analysis of these screams. There wasn't any speech, the quality was via telephone (which alone poses many hazards to higher frequencies*), under the speaking of the person on the phone/dispatcher, from an unknown distance. Given that he states specifically that the more "obscuring events" the longer the speech has to be, and the fact that there is no speech.. how can he make any determination at all? There's more, that's just the first step.
Edit below:
I just wanted to make it clear that I'm specifically talking about Mr. Owens' analysis of the screams. I know the special prosecutor probably recorded Mr. Zimmerman in the walkthrough when they had him yell a number of times. In Mr. Owens' analysis he states that he compared the screams to the voice (Mr. Zimmerman's) heard in the 911 call.
* - I tried to find info on this to link, but it seems as if the digital age has fixed this in modern telephone systems and in turn made it a bit more difficult to find info on it. I would place a wager that because the 911 telephone system has some redundancy systems in place it hasn't been updated to digital lines. If you remember "back in the good ol' days" when you were on the phone, the voice of the person you were speaking to would sound different than it does when you're speaking in person. This is because the telephone back then filtered out frequencies above a certain point.
csziggy said:
The software Mr. Owens used for his analysis, Easy Voice Biometrics, is recently introduced for sale in the US, though it has already been accepted for use in court.
Which is just a highly "dumbed down" version of CoolEdit, in my opinion - based upon the tech info for the software found here:
http://www.easyvoicebiometrics.com/d...tionalinfo.pdf
Looking over that, there are 3 methods used by the software:
NOTE Edited into this comment: We know from the FBI's findings that there is less than 4 seconds worth of screams that could be used for identification process.
Spectral-Formant Method provides high reliability of identification results and has the following
advantages:
Requires just as little as 16 seconds length of speech sample.
...
Pitch Statistics Analysis Method.
...
Requires the minimum of 10 seconds length of speech sample (which is even less than the Spectral-Formant method).
...
NOTE Edited into this comment: The above method is what is used for comparing emotional states. If anything Mr. Owen should have used that one, according to the documentation of the software.
Gaussian Mixture Models based Method (GMM).
...
High speed of the speaker search.
Ideal for clear recordings with low noise level.
Ideal for long recordings.
...
I think it's safe to say that not only does Mr. Owens' own words contradict his analysis, but the documentation from the software he uses says he shouldn't have even tried.
FBI's analysis: They said what Mr. Owen should have - in fact, I wonder if they use the same software that he does (or have a version of software based on it). I don't see how much more straight forward it could have been. They could not determine the word after "fu**ing" - which Mr. Owen (I believe) was the one that said it was "punks". They did not have the longevity to make any conclusions based on the poor quality of the audio sampled against Mr. Zimmerman's screams from the walk through that investigators did with him. This brings me back to Mr. Owen. He did not have those screams recorded after the fact, his tests were based on the 911 call audio that Mr. Zimmerman placed. Once again, I say that Mr. Owen isn't just in left field, he's so far past left field that he can't even see the stadium.