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Witness Seminar Speaker Identification & Workshop Forensic Voices

On Friday, June 17, 2022, Karin Bijsterveld (MUSTS) and Anna Kvíčalová (Masaryk University, Brno & Centre for Theoretical Study, Prague) hosted a witness seminar on speaker identification. A witness seminar is an established oral history technique intending to elicit participants’ memories of particular events or episodes within a field of scientific expertise through a moderated conversation. The participating speaker identification experts were Angelika Braun, Herbert Masthoff and Maartje Schreuder. The organizers aim to talk to Peter French and Ton Broeders in a later phase. The witness seminar was followed by a workshop on Forensic Voices: Cultures of Sonic Identification in which scholars specialized in the history of speaker identification and related practices discussed pre-distributed papers. These scholars were – on top of Kvíčalová and Bijsterveld – Willemijn Ruberg, Josephine Hoegaerts, and Mike Mopas. The participants of both events had lunch together. Bringing a limited number of genuine experts together stipulated lively discussions. The organizers will publish a transcript of the witness seminar and hope to make a special issue drawing on the workshop papers.