Does Human Speech Follow Benford's Law

Researchers have observed that the frequencies of leading digits in many man-made and naturally occurring datasets follow a logarithmic curve, with digits that start with the number 1 accounting for 30% of all numbers in the dataset and digits that start with the number 9 accounting for 5% of all numbers in the dataset. This phenomenon, known as Benford's Law, is highly repeatable and appears in lists of numbers from electricity bills, stock prices, tax returns, house prices, death rates, lengths of rivers, and naturally occurring images. This paper will demonstrate that human speech spectra also follow Benford's Law. This observation is used to motivate a new set of features that can be efficiently extracted from speech and demonstrate that these features can be used to classify between human speech and synthetic speech.