Texas audio engineer Jeanetta Brantley enhanced the Nolan Wells audio herself, importing the MP3 into her professional audio engineering systems to work out what was said in the background of the emergency call placed on July 4. No investigator and no official assigned to the case did that work.
Video:
Brantley has 16 years of experience in sound and audio engineering and holds a bachelor’s degree in music production from Full Sail University. But,” she told Baller Alert, “when I went to the school, they actually introduced me to the other aspects of what I do now. The post-production work, sound design, dialogue cleaning [and] dialogue editing.” She went on to earn a master’s degree in entertainment business.
She has been following the story of Nolan Wells, the 18-year-old Ole Miss freshman who took a boat trip to Horn Island with friends on July 4 and was found dead days later. Mississippi’s official state autopsy findings have not been released, but a private autopsy commissioned by the Wells family preliminarily ruled his cause and manner of death “undetermined pending investigation.” More recently, the Mississippi Department of Marine Resources released audio of an emergency call made from the boat his friends were on that day. Around 4 p.m., someone on the boat called Sea Tow, a private towing company.
Like many people, Brantley listened to the Nolan Wells audio published by news outlet WLOX. Her professional training gave her concerns. “When I played it back, I was like, I know I didn’t hear what I think I heard. Is somebody yelling Nolan?” she told Baller Alert. “Ain’t no way they’re yelling Nolan when allegedly he wasn’t on the boat.” Later that day, she imported the recording into an older version of her audio engineering system, Logic Pro X, and enhanced the quieter background dialogue. She identified and separated the audio channels, enhanced and reduced frequencies, and isolated the background dialogue from every other sound on the call.
Brantley posted the enhanced audio on July 26. In the post, she points to several moments of dialogue that she says place Nolan on the boat when someone called Sea Tow. She said she heard comments in the background including “Damn it, Bart, No No’s really dead now” and “can we cover this up.” During her interview with Baller Alert, she described how she felt once she heard the enhanced version. “I just wanted to hear. I wanted to hear what I thought I heard before I even attempted to touch it,” she said tearfully. “When I heard the ‘can we cover this up,’ there was instant anger, disgust. I was disheartened.”
Many people on social media have questioned the authenticity of her work, claiming the audio is AI-altered. Brantley said AI tools such as Clarity VX, Waves and Stem Splitters could have assisted her through the complex process, but she intentionally refrained from using them. AI “can be aggressive,” she told Baller Alert, and “it can introduce sounds that were never there to begin with.” She continued, “Because I know that, that’s the 100% main reason why I chose not to use any type of AI, including the plugins that I know are AI-assisted at its core.”
Her enhanced version of the Nolan Wells audio has been played on Nancy Grace and referenced in several news publications, but Brantley said no public official has reached out to her. In her social media post, she encouraged listeners to “judge [the recording] with [their] own ears.”
