John Corning Jr., age 16, of Jamestown, N. Y., for his question:

WHAT IS VOICEPRINT IDENTIFICATION?

Voiceprint identification is a method by which a person can be identified from a spectrographic picture of his or her spoken words. As identification by fingerprinting assumes that no two persons have identical ridges on their fingertips, voiceprint identification assumes that certain physical characteristics of the vocal organs, which influence the quality of the sound in speech, will not be exactly the same in any two persons.

Those characteristics are the size of the vocal cavities, the throat,