The role of between- versus within-speaker acoustic variability in vocal identity perception
Jody E. Kreiman, Yoonjeong Lee · The Journal of the Acoustical Society of America · 2019
Our recent studies [JASA 145(Pt. 2), 1930, (2019); this conference] show that acoustic spaces characterizing within- and between-speaker variability in voice quality have similar structures, with a few features (acoustic variability and formant dispersion) important for all speakers combined with idiosyncratic features characterizing individual talkers. These findings suggest that voice discrimination should be based on shared features, while “telling voices together” should depend on knowledge of each individual’s vocal idiosyncrasies. To test this hypothesis, we selected a set of voices that varied systematically in acoustic closeness to each other and to the center of the group acoustic space, based on values of shared features. Listeners were presented with multiple samples of each voice and were asked to sort the voices into piles according to perceived speaker identity. Based on prototype models of voice perception, we hypothesized that errors in telling voices apart would be strongly predictable from distances in the group acoustic space, but that errors in telling voices together would not be significantly associated with these distances. Separate analyses will attempt to shed light on the features and strategies involved in this second kind of judgment. [Work supported by NIH/NSF.]