Dominic Watt: The MSc program in forensic speech science is the only one of its type in
the world. It's the first of its type in the world. The MSc program is
partly taught by staff from JP French Associates, which is the U.K.'s
oldest and largest private forensic speech and audio lab.
Peter French: My main job is in forensic speech science, which involves me analysing
recordings usually for judicial purposes. So a lot of this work involves
forensic speaker comparisons. What we're doing there is comparing the
voices in criminal recordings with the voices of known suspects and
assisting the courts with issues of identity. Was it the defendant,
or was it not the defendant?
Philippa Bushell: We've been able to go to court and see Peter French in action, giving
evidence in a trial. We've gone around his offices to see what they do on a
day-to-day basis, and it's been really interesting seeing the things we've
done this year, they actually do that in their day-to-day lives.
So what we're doing is really relevant.
Buns Cooper: One of the really exciting things about the program is that we work on real
forensic data all the time, for the most part not live cases.
They've already been settled, but they're genuine, mostly criminal cases that have
been worked on by people from JPF Associates.
Dominic Watt: We take students from the basics of speech acoustics through to doing some
very sophisticated, research level activities and producing a research
project of their own devising for the dissertation, and in many cases,
that work is of such high quality that we have it published. We have a very good
conversion rate to PhD as well. Students are kind of bitten by the bug.
As they do the MSc, they decide they want to stay on and really get stuck into
a larger scale research project.
Peter French: One of the great advantages of doing the MSC and forensic speech science
here at York is not just that you have practical input from the likes of me
and other people who work in the lab on the cases, but also you really are
genuinely being taught by the world leaders in research in that area.
