This website is under construction. A fuller version will become available in September 2023. For more information contact Dr Elisa Pellegrino elisa.pellegrino@uzh.ch or Sarah Ford sarah.ford@jpfrench.com

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JP French International

Our Services

Voice Comparison – comparing recorded voices with known suspects to assist with identification or elimination

Speaker Profiling – analysing recordings of unknown speakers to gain information about them (ethnicity, accent, age, etc)

Content Analysis – establishing what was said in limited areas of a recording, or in the entire recording (transcription)

Enhancement – applying sound processing technology to improve the clarity of recorded conversation

Authenticity Examinations – to establish whether a recording is genuine or edited, and when it was made

Sound Source Analysis – to determine what a recorded non-speech sound is (e.g., a gunshot, a car backfiring, a door banging)

Acoustic Reconstructions of Crime Scenes – to ascertain, for example, what could be heard by people at various points on the scene at the time of the crime

Who we are

JP French International is the product of an amalgamation of two organisations: JP French Associates and the forensic casework arm of Centre for Forensic Phonetics and Acoustics.

We are confident that our complementary strengths, i.e., the most highly qualified staff, cutting edge technology, and quality assurance procedures, provide the best possible service to those seeking advice and expert reports in this field.

Here’s our Story

JP French Associates (JPFA) was established in 1987 in York UK and provided forensic voice and audio services to law enforcement personnel and lawyers throughout the world ever since. The firm acted in around 7,000 cases and provided evidence for courts of all levels, including International Commissions of Enquiry, the International War Crimes Tribunal, and the China Tribunal. The cases have involved several Heads of State, three Royal Families, and various internationally famous sportsmen and celebrities. Crimes include genocide, crimes against humanity, forced harvesting of human organs, major acts of terrorism, drugs and firearms smuggling, and people trafficking. 

The Centre for Forensic Phonetics and Acoustics (CFPA) was co-founded within the University of Zürich by Professor Volker Dellwo and Professor Peter French (Head of JPFA) in 2019.  CFPA is situated within a linguistic ‘melting pot’, the University of Zürich being one of the world’s most multi-cultural and multi-lingual institutions. This has allowed CFPA to establish a continuously growing network of carefully selected expert linguists and speech scientists representing languages across the world, thus enabling successful forensic casework in languages that would have been otherwise impossible. Languages include:

Arabic, Spanish, French, Italian, German, Dutch, Danish, Norwegian, Swedish, Albanian, Polish, Russian, Swiss German, Serbo-Croatian, Ukrainian, Belarusian, Georgian, Baltic state languages, and a range of Indian and African languages

We see the amalgamation of JPFA and the casework arm of CFPA into a single organisation, JP French International, as an exciting development that will contribute to the quality of justice in countries across the world.