Speaking the language of voice recognition Voice recognition processes are fundamental to human social interaction, enabling us to rapidly identify a speaker and participate in discourse with other people. While previously a common assumption was that we recognise speakers on the basis of static features in their voice, Professor Volker Dellwo and his colleagues in an SNSF-funded project are now exploring a different hypothesis. Voices are made up of individual acoustics, the voice timbre, by which speakers can be identified, a phenomenon common across all languages. While there are many other ways to identify people, voice recognition is fundamental to human social interaction. “If you are in a social situation with six or seven people, where multiple people are talking at once, then you are entirely lost in the discourse if you can’t attribute voices to the individuals. There’s no way you can participate in the dialogue,” stresses Volker Dellwo, Professor in the Phonetics and Speech Sciences Group at the University of Zurich. As the Principal Investigator of an SNSF-funded research project based at the University, Professor Dellwo and his group are now investigating the importance of voice recognition in communication. “How do speakers construct their voice to help individuals recognise them?” he outlines.
Indexical properties Professor Dellwo and his team in the project are exploring a novel viewpoint. “Our argument is that voice specific properties are not static. Rather humans control them, deliberately, to fulfil certain communicative needs,” he says. “There
This recognisability does not happen by chance, rather the speakers adapt their voice to ensure they can be easily identified. There are also circumstances where a speaker may want to adopt a style which makes them less easily recognisable, maybe if they are trying to deceive their audience. “Our contention is that
“Our argument is that speaker-specific properties in voice are not static. Rather, humans control them deliberately to fulfil certain communicative needs.” are certain situations where speakers want to make sure they are recognisable. For example, politicians need to be iconic, thus their voice - amongst other properties - is part of their identity that stands for a certain political programme or view that they hold.”
these speaking styles are not more – or less – recognisable by chance. There is a strategy behind them,” says Professor Dellwo. Two PhD candidates, Valeriia Perepelytsia and Leah Bradshaw, are now looking to gain fresh insights in this area by using AI, machine learning and behavioural as well as
Part of the project team in the speech & voice laboratory of the Linguistic Research Infrastructure (LiRI) at Zurich University.
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