Suppose a close longtime friend, whom you have not seen for ten years, calls you up on the telephone. You pick up the phone and your friend starts talking without saying their name. It wouldn’t take you very much time to realize whose voice it was on the other side of the line, would it?
I was listening to NPR the other day and I heard James Fallows’s voice. He wasn’t talking about China or any of the other topics I had heard him talk about when I used to watch him on the McNeil-Lehrer News Hour years ago. But I could instantly categorize the voice I was hearing as his voice and not somebody else’s.
What an amazing skill! Some voices are more distinctive than others but pretty much anybody can do this without even thinking about it. Studies have shown humans can accomplish this task in about two spoken words. It seems like a trivial intuitive process but when you think about it, it’s a very impressive feat.
Singing voices are the same way, maybe easier. If you’re listening to Pandora and a song you’ve never heard before comes up by one of your favorite singers, you know almost instantly who it is. Among unfamiliar voices you can distinguish children from adults, males from females, etc. with a high degree of accuracy. If your coworker calls in sick, you can tell they’re is all stuffed up.
No doubt about it, recognition of distinct sound patterns is a miraculous gift that we humans possess. Other species apparently don’t have the ability to recognize voices. Cats are pretty smart animals but they can’t identify people over the telephone when tested in the laboratory. I’d bet whales wouldn’t be able to either but I’d bet they know what their own weird sonar sounds mean.
On the other hand, maybe dogs can identify humans by their voices to some degree. There is some anecdotal evidence for that. Many of us are familiar with Nipper the dog, a famous trademark of the RCA Victor company. The logo of a dog fascinated by “his master’s voice” coming out of the phonograph is based on a painting of a dog sitting on a coffin listening to his master’s recorded voice at the funeral. The painting is supposedly based on a true life story.
Our love of music, a human trait common to every culture, must be in some way related to this amazing ability of voice recognition.
When I say voice recognition, I mean recognition of a particular speaker or singer. Another kind of voice recognition is turning spoken language into text. Computers are fast but in many ways they are inferior to humans at both of these tasks. Computers are getting better and better at it, but humans don’t need to. Evolution has taken care of that in a brilliant way that neuroscientists are still trying to understand.
How humans recognize voices seems to be connected in some way to the way we recognize faces. A brain imaging study of a child listening to Mom over a telephone shows that the auditory processing part of the brain and the visual processing area are both being stimulated. And people have more difficulty matching district voices with printed names than with picture of faces. But the language processing part of the brain appears to play a part as well. Patients with dyslexia have more trouble with voice (speaker) recognition and voices in an unfamiliar language are more difficult for most people.
We can all be grateful for the gift of music, of sounds and of voices! If you forgot your program and can’t remember who’s on stage at Grass Valley one afternoon you might pick up your pace if you hear Dale Ann Bradley start her first set and you’re not there yet. These things we take for granted sure come in handy.
