Identification

For some time now, HSBC has been able to identify me on the telephone by my voice, telephone signal degradation notwithstanding. Identify me in the sense of always allowing me in, so no false negatives. No idea how many false positives there might be, although one hopes that their testing team did look at that.

For some time also, mobile phones and other devices of that sort have been able to identify pieces of music on the basis of an audio sample of just a few seconds, certainly well under a minute. I talked about one way of doing this at reference 1, a way that did not require the identifying computer to know anything about music. All a bit crude really, but it did work.

Recently, I have been aware of identifying actors and actresses on ITV3 by voice. Actors and actresses who are on the circuit, who are up for helping out in murder mysteries; Morse, Lewis, Poirot and all that sort of thing. One sees a face which is vaguely familiar and one is not sure. Then one becomes sure because of the voice. Quite confident that one has heard the voice before. And quite often, not long before the where one has heard the voice before comes to mind.

So this happened yesterday when I thought that I knew the chap playing one Gabriel Dauntsey in a DVD rendering (ex reference 4 for a couple of quid or so) of a murder mystery called 'Original Sin'. Then I was really struck by the voice. Then I realised that he was the older spy who get bashed about by the Russkies in 'Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy'. And a little checking revealed that this was indeed the case. The late Ian Bannen.

My impression was that sometimes a very short sound clip - say several seconds - was enough for a positive identification. On the other hand, it seems unlikely that this identification rests on something as conceptually simple as that at reference 1. So when I need a bit of R&R later today, I shall see what I can find out.

PS: didn't get as far as finding anything out, but I did wonder whether, if you were to tell an actor how the computer did it, he would be able to fool it? Push it to either false negative or false positive?

References

Reference 1: http://psmv3.blogspot.com/2017/11/music-identification.html.

Reference 2: https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0117261/. Original sin.

Reference 3: https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0080297/. Tinker, tailor etc.

Reference 4: https://uk.webuy.com/. Unlike most car boot sale vendors, at least these shops sort their DVD's out.