can a recording be altered

[blackbird11]

my husband secretly recorded me while i was home speaking to someone, he says that he has me on tape talking to another man. he let me listen to the recording, and i am speaking to my son who i was speaking to, but then there is another voice that comes in faintly in the background as if I am speaking with a third person. he is now accusing me of cheating, now I was speaking to my son when he recoeded me, i think he set me up and i told him that he did this to have an excuse for divorce and he tells me i am crazy because there is no way for him to mess with and alter a recording. He works in IT he is very computer savy. can someone please tell me if he could have done something with this recording. I do not know how he recorded, when I listened to it he had it on the laptop, but I think he had a recorded somewhere in the apartment. I am really loosing my mind over this, either he did something or there is a ghost in my home. Please help.

thank you

[MOVIEGEEK]

You're husband is right...you're crazy.

[jagabo]

Any recording can be altered in the way you describe. It's trivial to add another voice.

[hydra3333]

I do not think this is a real post; the spelling, grammar and logic is child-like. If it really is, the suffering person only need consider how music is produced, ie mixing.

[Cornucopia]

Of course there's a way to alter recordings. Some are more transparent/obvious than others. Some are more forensically detectable (and isolatable) than others.

Particularly, if you were recorded in a particular space, and then someone else was recorded later in that same space (with very similarly occuring background/ambience), and the recorder was in the same position in that space, a simple mixing (adding tracks) of the two in any standard audio editor can blend them together (this is what's known in the biz as OVERDUBBING) and make it sound like they were recorded at the same time.

Only way to forensically tell that this was altered, without having a non-overdubbed reference to check against, is to look at the waveforms and spectrum (and do some serious high-fidelity critical listening) and find duplicate events that can't be attributed to acoustical echo. If you had the reference, you could also check against doubling of self-noise (happens when adding tracks), or distortion (from multiple compression generations if you were using compression). There are a few other "signature" things to find, but not much.


However, if your husband isn't TRUSTING your side of the story to begin with, you've got worse things to deal with than some scientific/forensic test of audio recordings...

Scott

[edDV]

Is your son supporting your version? A quick hour (usually free) with a lawyer will steady your mind.

[jagabo]

A silly little sample:

doh.mp3