The following two stories tell of the significance of sounds: On November 22, 1963, President John F. Kennedy died in Dallas. The assertion that there was acoustic evidence for a second gunman next to Lee Harvey Oswald was shocking and fueled conspiracy theories. By way of a chronologically synchronized analysis, detectives compared what had been heard and recorded on two open police radio channels. The result: What some people had thought was a second shot in fact happened a whole minute after the assassination.

On August 10, 2000, the Kursk, one of the most technologically advanced submarines in the Russian fleet, set sail under Captain Gennadi Petrovich Lyachin. Two days later NORSAR, the Norwegian Seismic Array near Oslo, heard unusual sounds coming from the Barents Sea. Here, seismologists usually listen for nuclear tests, but in this case they had heard the acoustic signs of an accident. And while scientists set about interpreting data in Norway, official reports were released, which led to a maelstrom of secrecy, disinformation and propaganda. Claims arose that a second submarine from a Western nation had rammed the Kursk, for which there was no evidence. On the contrary, clear evidence was found for two explosions; a malfunction and a chain reaction, both in the Kursk’s torpedo section.

At the 123rd convention of the Audio Engineering Society in New York, Catalin Grigoras from Bucharest claimed to be able to differentiate the mains adapters of digital recorders by their sound. And Garrett Husveth envisioned the acoustic investigators of the future tracking down child pornography rings, organized crime and international terrorists, when we have revealed the audio steganography, with the help of which, for example, data can be hidden in MP3 files of pop songs. For be it a burden or an opportunity, in the future audio investigations will have to confront the problems of digitalization and hold strong in the face of the possibilities of manipulation in the world of 0 and 1.

Max Ackermann