Judicial Bias Audio Analysis Using Praat (Spectrographic Study) Daubert-Compliant Expert Scope of Work & Engagement Description

The audio under analysis is approximately 19 minutes in duration, and this engagement seeks an experienced audio and speech analyst to conduct a forensic, Daubert-compliant acoustic and interactional analysis of judicial audio recordings with the specific objective of detecting and quantifying potential judicial bias as manifested through speech patterns, vocal behavior, and discourse control. The project will utilize Praat, or scientifically equivalent peer-reviewed tools, to analyze vocal features and generate spectrographic, statistical, and visual evidence, and is expressly structured to comply with Federal Rule of Evidence 702 and Daubert v. Merrell Dow Pharmaceuticals by emphasizing testability, reliability, standards and controls, error awareness, and replicability. The expert is retained to determine whether measurable, statistically significant asymmetries exist in the judge’s speech when addressing different parties, including plaintiffs, defendants, and attorneys, and whether such asymmetries exceed intra-speaker and situational baselines in a manner consistent with empirically recognized indicators of bias in courtroom discourse; the analysis is strictly limited to objective, quantifiable speech behavior and does not offer legal conclusions, opinions regarding intent, or credibility determinations, which remain solely within the province of the Court. All work shall be conducted in accordance with established principles of forensic phonetics and acoustic phonetics, peer-reviewed methodologies implemented in Praat, generally accepted practices in sociophonetics and interactional linguistics, and the governing Daubert criteria, including falsifiability, known or potential error rates, general acceptance in the scientific community, and methodological transparency. The scope of work includes non-destructive cleaning and preprocessing of court audio recordings while preserving original files unaltered, full documentation of preprocessing steps to maintain chain-of-custody integrity, and identification and accounting for recording artifacts such as compression, latency, and crosstalk. Using Praat, the expert shall extract and analyze fundamental frequency (pitch) including mean, range, and variability, intensity measured by RMS amplitude, formant frequencies F1 through F4, speech rate and articulation rate, pause frequency and duration, stress patterns, voice onset time, and micro-perturbation measures including jitter and shimmer, with all parameters, algorithms, and settings fully documented. The analysis shall further include interactional and discourse analysis to identify and quantify interruptions, voicing overlap, turn-taking latency, and floor-seizure events, and to compare interaction patterns such as tone, interruptions, and stress responses across judicial speech directed toward plaintiffs, defendants, and attorneys, as well as subgroup comparisons where feasible, including gender and ethnicity, subject to data limitations, with explicit operational definitions applied to all interactional events to prevent subjective interpretation. Visualization outputs shall include spectrograms, pitch and intensity contours, formant trajectory plots, and temporal alignment charts illustrating the relationship between judicial interjections and acoustic or stress-related measures. The expert shall test predefined, falsifiable hypotheses addressing whether interruption frequency differs significantly by addressee, whether judicial acoustic features vary systematically by addressee, whether judicial interjections are temporally associated with stress-related acoustic changes in the interrupted speaker, and whether observed differences exceed intra-speaker baselines and contextual variability such as procedural versus substantive speech, with all baselines, normalization procedures, and controls explicitly defined. Statistical analysis shall include the application of appropriate parametric or non-parametric tests, reporting of significance thresholds, effect sizes, and confidence intervals, and explicit discussion of known or potential error rates, measurement uncertainty, and methodological limitations. To ensure replicability and transparency, the expert shall provide Praat version information, analysis scripts, parameter settings, and documentation sufficient for independent replication by another qualified analyst. Deliverables shall include processed audio datasets where applicable, Praat analysis files, scripts, and spectrograms, and a final written forensic report presenting methods, results, statistical findings, visual evidence, limitations, and alternative explanations. Required qualifications include proven experience in phonetics, linguistics, or forensic audio analysis, strong proficiency in Praat scripting and spectrographic analysis, and the ability to translate complex acoustic data into clear, accessible, court-appropriate insights, with a background in sociolinguistics or judicial or forensic studies preferred. The ideal candidate will be a detail-oriented researcher with strong technical and analytical expertise, demonstrated experience working on bias-related, forensic phonetics, or speech analysis projects, and strong written communication skills sufficient to produce a professional, data-driven report suitable for legal scrutiny, and interested candidates should submit a brief description of relevant experience, examples of prior Praat-based or forensic analyses if available, and an estimated timeline and budget for completion of the project, as this framework explicitly satisfies Daubert requirements through predefined hypotheses ensuring testability, peer-reviewed tools and standardized methods ensuring reliability, baselines and operational definitions ensuring standards and controls, statistical testing and stated limitations ensuring error awareness, and scripts, parameters, and documentation ensuring replicability.