Information from faces and voices combines to provide multimodal signals about a person. Faces and voices may offer redundant, overlapping (backup signals), or complementary information (multiple messages). This article reports two experiments which investigated the extent to which faces and voices deliver concordant information about dimensions of fitness and quality. In Experiment 1, particip...

Listeners can recognize familiar human voices from variable utterances, suggesting the acquisition of speech-invariant voice representations during familiarization. However, the neurocognitive mechanisms mediating learning and recognition of voices from natural speech are currently unknown. Using electrophysiology, we investigated how representations are formed during intentional learning of in...

How trustworthy is your voice? The effects of voice manipulation on the perceived trustworthiness of novel speakers How trustworthy is your voice? The effects of voice manipulation on the perceived trustworthiness of novel speakers ABSTRACT A person's voice is not only loaded with cues to age, sex and emotional state, listeners also readily form personality impressions of novel speakers. Based ...

Adapted mindfulness-based interventions (MBIs) could be of benefit for people distressed by hearing voices. This paper presents a systematic review of studies exploring this possibility and we ask five questions: (1) Is trait mindfulness associated with reduced distress and disturbance in relation to hearing voices? (2) Are MBIs feasible for people distressed by hearing voices? (3) Are MBIs acc...

Vocal pitch has been found to influence judgments of perceived trustworthiness and dominance from a novel voice. However, the majority of findings arise from using only male voices and in context-specific scenarios. In two experiments, we first explore the influence of average vocal pitch on first-impression judgments of perceived trustworthiness and dominance, before establishing the existence...

Pitch detection is one of the most difficult problems encountered when analyzing speech signals. This paper focuses on detecting the pitch in pathological voices, what is of key importance, for voice pathology diagnosis. In particular, we put special emphasis on diagnosing three common pathologies: roughness, hoarseness and breathiness. The intelligibility and quality of pathological voices are...

In this paper we evaluate how speaker familiarity influences the engagement times and performance of blind school children when playing audio games made with different synthetic voices. We developed synthetic voices of school children, their teachers and of speakers that were unfamiliar to them and used each of these voices to create variants of two audio games: a memory game and a labyrinth ga...

Speech synthesis based on Hidden Markov Models (HMM) and other statistical parametric techniques have been a hot topic for some time. Using this techniques, speech synthesizers are able to produce intelligible and flexible voices. Despite progress, the quality of the voices produced using statistical parametric synthesis has not yet reached the level of the current predominant unit-selection ap...