Listener recognition of unfamiliar speakers using conversational speech
Astrid Schmidt-Nielsen · The Journal of the Acoustical Society of America · 1984
Listeners attempted to recognize speakers from short excerpts of conversational speech. The listeners were given two repetitions of a 30-s familiarization paragraph read by each of the five speakers in the recognition set and were told to associate each voice with the name given by the speaker at the beginning of the paragraph. The test consisted of 25 excerpts taken from tape recordings of each of the speakers playing a game of battleship, and the listeners were asked to identify each sample by writing down the name of the speaker. The average duration of the excerpts was slightly more than 2 s. Three sets of five speakers each were tested: one group of female speakers, one group of male speakers who had been rated high in voice distinctiveness (by a separate group of subjects), and one group of male speakers who had been rated low in voice distinctiveness. There were two sets of excerpts for each speaker group, one taken from recordings made while the speakers were conversing over a 2400-bit/s LPC digital voice processor and one made while they were talking over an unprocessed channel. For the more distinctive males and the females, speaker recognition was better over the unprocessed channel than when they were speaking over LPC. However, some of the less distinctive males were better recognized over LPC than over the unprocessed channel, and the others were about the same in both conditions.