Dickey Gypped?

 Posted by Alecks Pabico 
PCIJ

FROM the looks of it, the two tracks that environment secretary Michael Defensor submitted to American audio forensic expert Barry Dickey for analysis may not have come from the Paguia tape as he claims.

This was the conclusion of our source, an independent audio expert, after reading Dickey's expert report on the said tracks.

Dickey's preliminary findings have pointed to certain "anomalies," in particular the absence of start and stop signatures.

Explains our source, "Mr. Dickey was expecting that the recording was done on a standard recording device. That's why he was looking for 'start'/'stop' clicks or signatures on both tracks. Obviously the tracks submitted were already edited and 'pre-selected' for analysis."

Since Jonathan Tiongco, Defensor's local audio expert, did not submit the entire recording but only two tracks, including the one with the "yung dagdag" portion, Dickey concluded a lack of consistency with original recordings.

From Dickey's point of view, that is an act of "splicing," our source says.

In the first track, Dickey also pointed to a sudden change in male voice/verbal pattern, referring to "participants in a manner that suggest knowledge of the recordings." Could the male voice at the front of the recordings that Dickey found strange either be lawyer Alan Paguia's (who inserted his own introduction) or the ISAFP agent's (who made the annotations before each conversation)?

But since Defensor is claiming that the tracks came from the Paguia tape, it couldn't have been the ISAFP agent since they were deleted by Paguia in his tape version, claims our informant.

Using Dickey's wave image on Track 1 as reference, our source is however clueless as to where this track was taken as he found no resemblance to any of the portions in either the Paguia tape or the three-hour recording.

However, doing a wave comparison of Dickey's Track 2, particularly in the first part, and the ISAFP agent's annotation of the conversation with the " yung dagdag" portion in the three-hour recording, our source found 100-percent identical wave characteristics in both.

"This has led me to conclude that Track 2 is not a Paguia tape track but a 'Tiongco-spliced' clip of 'yung dagdag' that included the ISAFP annotation," he says, indicating that Tiongco may have "pre-selected" in "cut-and-paste" fashion a portion of this track from the three-hour recording and created Track 2, which is an act of splicing.

The best part of Dickey's report, adds our source, is that there was no mention of any verbal or pitch anomaly on Track 2 — the "yung dagdag" track. "Simply because Dickey's pitch/discontinuity analysis on this track found none, except for the absence of "start" and "stop" signatures."