"Bertillon" Method A man can change every characteristic about himself except his figngerprints and the sound track of his voice. Just as individual as the whorls and s cops of his thumb-tips is the "print left by his voice as recorded by the modern means employed in motion pictures in Holly-yood.
Paul Neal, veteran sound man for Samuel Goldwyn, disclosed this fact after making a series of tests with positive prints on speeches by Gary Cooper and Merle Oberon taken from eir picture, "The Cowboy and the Lady." One morning, both stars had slight colds, enough to change their voices to the ear, but on the sound tracks they were undeniably the same.
From this meagre clue, Neal worked out a scheme of identification whereby the voice leaves an indelible track d its unmistakable signature on the celluloid film, Merle Oberon's vou oks like a cross section of a South Seas wave a lowly undulating much thi lity except the slopes of his waves are longer—thats the cowboy drawl—and occational tones are bitten off short.
"Basically," Neal continued, "it's the tonal structure of the person's voice which shows on the sound track. It is the same principle he said whereby a cello and a violin will record different tracks although they play identically the same note.
No practical scheme has been devised for cataloguing the various types of voice as the possibilities in this field are as yet unscratched."
With even a more meagre, however, start Bertillon gave to the world ihe modern-day style of classification and identification of criminals.
Perhaps in the not too distant future, there may be a division of und tracking" or voice-printing which will assume the prominence of the fingerprinting division of modern criminal detection plants.
Text read from the printed page and cleaned; old type leaves the occasional error.