Vocal caricatures reveal signatures of speaker identity

What are the features that impersonators select to elicit a speaker's identity? We built a voice database of public figures ( targets ) and imitations produced by professional impersonators. They produced one imitation based on their memory of the target ( caricature ) and another one after lis...

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Bibliographic Details
Published in:Scientific reports 2013-12, Vol.3 (1), p.3407-3407, Article 3407
Main Authors: López, Sabrina, Riera, Pablo, Assaneo, María Florencia, Eguía, Manuel, Sigman, Mariano, Trevisan, Marcos A.
Format: Article
Language:English
Subjects:
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639/766
639/766/747
Acoustics
Anatomy & physiology
Humanities and Social Sciences
Investigations
multidisciplinary
Physics
Physiology
Ratings & rankings
Science
Sound
Speeches
Visual perception
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Summary:What are the features that impersonators select to elicit a speaker's identity? We built a voice database of public figures ( targets ) and imitations produced by professional impersonators. They produced one imitation based on their memory of the target ( caricature ) and another one after listening to the target audio ( replica ). A set of naive participants then judged identity and similarity of pairs of voices. Identity was better evoked by the caricatures and replicas were perceived to be closer to the targets in terms of voice similarity. We used this data to map relevant acoustic dimensions for each task. Our results indicate that speaker identity is mainly associated with vocal tract features, while perception of voice similarity is related to vocal folds parameters. We therefore show the way in which acoustic caricatures emphasize identity features at the cost of loosing similarity, which allows drawing an analogy with caricatures in the visual space.
ISSN:2045-2322
2045-2322
DOI:10.1038/srep03407