Pictures from the event
As the students gathered in live sound, Bryan kicked us off by letting us know a little about his past and his 35 year career. From working with Lucas Arts and different Metal Bands to working hand in hand directly with the F.B.I. in 23 different countries as a professional forensic audiologist.
One of the most interesting aspects of Bryan's job is most of the audio that he receives isn't necessarily "high quality" like what you would expect to see at a professional recording studio. Most of what Mr. Neumiester obtains is the exact opposite. For example, when a police department stores hard "original" audio evidence it is reduced from 16 bit to 8 bit without he use of dither drastically reducing the quality and adding in unwanted noise. One of his jobs is to disprove what a jury thinks they might hear in an audio clip.
Bryan then gave us some examples of the challenges he might come across. One example was an audio clip of a gunshot. The clip was recorded a half a mile away. In order to identify the gun exactly, Bryan and a few detectives went out to a gun range and recorded a different gunshots to compare. He would also have to recreate the original audio clip which might include background noise, cars driving by, etc...
Afterwards some of the students were curious about what would need to be done to get into the forensic audio field. Bryan suggested getting into beta testing and getting familiar with codec systems. It was an honor to have such a busy individual with an incredibly decorated past give all of our own ears a little taste of forensic audio.
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