Sound engineer questions authenticity of ‘sex tapes’

A local sound engineer has questioned the “authenticity” of three ‘sex tapes’ released earlier this week, which are alleged to be voice recordings between a high ranking member of the Unity Labour Party and a female.{{more}}

The sound man, who prefers to remain anonymous, said that the file that reached most people, when it was opened, had the name ‘ID3tag’. He said that there are two types of information that come under that tagging format, with tag one having basic information, such as track, title, artiste name and album.

“That’s where, for instance, the deck in your car will pull the info like name and such things and flash it across a screen. Now, Tag 2 is a more detailed tag that has a lot of the same things, but has additional information like Beats Per Minute (BPM) and the initial key which has technical info and encoder setting.”

According to the engineer, the encoder setting or the program that made the recording is burnt into the recording as a marketing tool and cannot be removed.

“In this case, the first sex tape encoder settings is Logic 10.2 and when I heard that, that now raised my eyebrows. The program Logic is not widely used here and is only used by highly skilled persons who use it to make beats and ads.

“In my head, even if this person whoever had the original felt the need to convert the file, a lot of other less complicated apps can convert to mp3 for free. Let’s say argumentatively, they used Logic to transform the file so they could upload it to Soundcloud as an MP3, this has to be an audio professional and Logic is not widely used and is only available for MAC computers.”

The engineer added that the user of Logic has to be somebody who is into audio production, so the fact that one of the recordings shows it went through logic causes persons with knowledge in this field to question the reason why Logic was used.

“If you are presenting evidence as the tape was made out to do, you cannot tamper with evidence. By the time it passes through Logic, it diminishes the authenticity. The capabilities of the program is vast. It was encoded, which also leaves questions open.”

He noted that what also stood out is the clarity of both voices, as with phone voice recordings, the caller’s vocals is usually clearer than the person receiving the call.

“The caller’s vocals would be clearer than the other person; you tend to hear a lopsided convo where as the person receiving the call has their voice go through their phone then through the network and that diminishes the quality, so when I see quality being so good and it has passed through Logic, that mean anything could have been done.”

He added that he would need the original files to process them, as he was only able to process one file and that is the result he came up with.

“I’m not saying that the tape is real or not real, but if I have the original file I might could tell, if it was a case where it was being made to look like this girl leaked the tapes herself, this girl would have to be well versed in Logic. It would have been easier to upload online and use a free program.”

The tapes were first released on Facebook via a medium called Soundcloud, but were removed hours after, but not before persons downloaded the recordings and shared them via social applications like Blackberry Messenger (BBM) and WhatsApp.

The tapes, one over 18 minutes long, another over six minutes and the third one shorter, are each of a female and a male involved in phone sex. During the conversations, the two use obscene language and colloquial terminologies to describe their sex organs.