A Black woman enhanced the audio in a call related to Nolan Wells’ case. What she heard has people listening closely
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Audio engineer, Jeanetta Brantley, cleaned up the Sea Tow audio tied to Nolan Wells’ case, now social media is listening closely.
This week, new audio surfaced of a call potentially linked to Nolan Wells’ case. The recording stemmed from a call made on July 4, around 4 PM to a private towing company, Sea Tow, about a boat suspected to have been involved in Nolan Wells’ case. While the audio released by the Mississippi Department of Marine Resources (MDMR) included sections that were a bit hard to hear, a Black audio engineer Jeanetta Brantley, took it upon herself to use her skills to clean up the audio in hopes of getting a clearer understanding of what was said.
“As a professional audio engineer with experience in dialogue editing, dialogue cleanup, sound design, and post production. I decided to work on that Sea Tow call using traditional audio processing techniques rather than relying on any AI voice separation or AI enhancement. My goal was pretty much to preserve as much of the original recording as possible while making the quieter dialogue and background audio easier to hear,” Brantley explained in a video posted to Threads. “And I specifically chose not to rely on AI because aggressive AI enhancements and voice isolation tools can sometimes introduce artifacts and distort the speech or create ambiguity around the sounds that were originally present.”
Using techniques like “subtractive EQ, compression, gain adjustments, noise reduction, frequency isolation, and other traditional processing methods,” Brantley who founded Audio Done Right (ADR) a full-service sync licensing agency, production music library, music supervision, and audio post-production company, turned down the dispatcher’s dialogue and worked to try to enhance the quieter background dialogue heard on the caller side, which appeared in the released recording. However, what she uncovered quickly made her pause her initial mission and share the audio.
“I originally intended to continue much further, but once I separated the dispatcher from the boat and started concentrating exclusively on the background dialogue, what I believed I was hearing became extremely difficult for me to process emotionally, and I needed to take a mental break,” she shared. “But I wanted to release this portion because some of the details that stood out most to me occurred very early in the call, like, right at the top of the call.”
“I want you to listen first, listen again, compare with the original recording, and then judge it with your own ears,” she encouraged.
And social media users did just that, listening closely to the released audio in hopes it would reveal some clues about what may have happened to the 18-year-old whose body was found on Horn Island on July 6th.
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While the cleaned-up audio has drawn attention from social media users and Nancy Grace and Don Lemon, as one user noted, the officials investigating the case have yet to comment on the new audio, and the statements many users are hearing in the cleaned-up audio. In the three weeks since Wells’ body was discovered, social media users across the country have been notably vocal about sounding the alarm on the teen’s case.
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Between the conflicting claims about the events of the day, pending autopsy results from Mississippi officials, the fight to uncover the truth about what happened to Wells continues. And as his mother, Christine Wonsley, requested during his funeral service, Black communities are not giving up because far too often we have seen patterns of Black people, particularly Black youth’s cases, going unsolved.
“I ask that each of you keep Nolan’s memory alive. Hold him close in your hearts. Share his stories, and never stop saying his name. As long as we continue to remember him, his light will continue to shine through us all,” she shared. “Nolan, we love you. We’ll continue to fight for you.”
“Understand that Nolan Wells was the son of Christine and Elmore, but he really was all our sons. Because if something this tragic can happen to their son, It can happen to your children,” the family’s attirney Ben Crump added. “So we all have to stand up together and say we’re fighting for justice for Nolan Wells because he is our son too. Until we get answers, until we get to the truth, until we get to justice, we gonna stand up and we’re gonna keep ringing the justice bells for Nolan Wells.