Understanding voice processing

Voices convey important social information about a person’s identity, emotions, and speech. However, humans appear to have more difficulty recognising one another by the voice, and may have more trouble under changing conditions. As part of the Hummingbird Project, we will experimentally test how factors such as noise and disguise influence the voice recognition abilities of both humans and computer algorithms. The information gained from these studies will then be used to improve voice recognition algorithms by implementing human-like strategies.