MixedTruth: Component-Level Detection of Synthetic Speech and Synthetic Background in Mixed Audio

Abstract

Modern generative audio can fabricate not only voices but also the acoustic environments that provide evidence of when and where speech occurred. This capability undermines a longstanding forensic assumption that background sound provides reliable evidence of a recording's provenance. Yet existing detectors produce only a single real-or-synthetic verdict, leaving analysts unable to determine whether the voice, the environment, or both were manipulated. In this paper, we propose a component-level forensic detector, namely TruMix, which classifies recordings into eight categories spanning the presence and authenticity of speech and background. TruMix has a unique multi-path architecture that jointly analyzes speech-oriented and background-oriented spectral evidence, contextual information from the mixed waveform, and low-level synthesis artifacts. This design avoids the artifact propagation inherent in conventional separate-then-detect pipelines while enabling generalization across independent speech and environmental-sound generators. We also curated MixedTruth, a 4,917-hour benchmark covering all eight categories under diverse mixing conditions. Extensive experiments show that TruMix achieves 98.51% AUC for component-level attribution, significantly outperforms ten state-of-the-art synthetic-speech detectors in conventional binary classification, and exhibits strong robustness across four attack tiers.