# The Sound of Silence: Efficiency of First Digit Features in Synthetic Audio Detection

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2210.02746 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2210.02746/

## Key facts

- Cited by 5 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 11 of its 41 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 6 Oct 2022.

## Builds on (most cited first, 11 of 11)

- [WaveNet: A Generative Model for Raw Audio](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1609.03499/) (2016)
- [Tacotron: Towards End-to-End Speech Synthesis](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1703.10135/) (2017)
- [End-to-end anti-spoofing with RawNet2](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2011.01108/) (2020)
- [ASVspoof 2021: accelerating progress in spoofed and deepfake speech detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2109.00537/) (2021)
- [LPCNet: Improving Neural Speech Synthesis Through Linear Prediction](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1810.11846/) (2018)
- [Deep Voice 3: Scaling Text-to-Speech with Convolutional Sequence Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1710.07654/) (2017)
- [CycleGAN-VC2: Improved CycleGAN-based Non-parallel Voice Conversion](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1904.04631/) (2019)
- [Speech is Silver, Silence is Golden: What do ASVspoof-trained Models Really Learn?](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2106.12914/) (2021)
- [AttS2S-VC: Sequence-to-Sequence Voice Conversion with Attention and Context Preservation Mechanisms](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1811.04076/) (2018)
- [On the use of Benford's law to detect GAN-generated images](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2004.07682/) (2020)
- [Detection of AI-Synthesized Speech Using Cepstral & Bispectral Statistics](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2009.01934/) (2020)

## Built on by (most cited first, 5 of 5)

- [How to Construct Perfect and Worse-than-Coin-Flip Spoofing Countermeasures: A Word of Warning on Shortcut Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2306.00044/) (2023)
- [All-for-One and One-For-All: Deep learning-based feature fusion for Synthetic Speech Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2307.15555/) (2023)
- [Who is Authentic Speaker](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2405.00248/) (2024)
- [Traceback Translators Against Forgetting in Continual Fake Speech Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2607.12569/) (2026)
- [Explainable-by-Design Audio Deepfake Detection via Wiener-Hopf Linear Prediction](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2607.12584/) (2026)

## Abstract (arXiv)

The recent integration of generative neural strategies and audio processing techniques have fostered the widespread of synthetic speech synthesis or transformation algorithms. This capability proves to be harmful in many legal and informative processes (news, biometric authentication, audio evidence in courts, etc.). Thus, the development of efficient detection algorithms is both crucial and challenging due to the heterogeneity of forgery techniques. This work investigates the discriminative role of silenced parts in synthetic speech detection and shows how first digit statistics extracted from MFCC coefficients can efficiently enable a robust detection. The proposed procedure is computationally-lightweight and effective on many different algorithms since it does not rely on large neural detection architecture and obtains an accuracy above 90% in most of the classes of the ASVSpoof dataset.