Defining the psychoacoustical space of vocal imitations and caricatures.

LÓPEZ, SABRINA L.; RIERA, PABLO; ASSANEO, FLORENCIA; EGUÍA, MANUEL; TREVISAN, MARCOS A.

Huerta Grande, Córdoba

Congreso; XXVII CONGRESO ANUAL DE LA SOCIEDAD ARGENTINA DE INVESTIGACIÓN EN NEUROCIENCIAS; 2013

Sociedad Argentina de Investigación en Neurociencias

The relationship between the speaker´s identity and the psychoacoustic parameters characterizing his/her voice has been a matter of debate in the literature and still remains elusive. Here we built a database using phrases of famous argentinian characters (targets), along with the copies produced by professional and amateur impersonators. We asked them to reproduce the original phrases before and after listening to the target phrases. We call the first type of copy a caricature (based on an internal pattern of the target that the impersonator has) and the second one an imitation (based on the actual target phrase). Our perceptual experiments showed that the identity of the speaker is better elicited by the caricatures, while voice similarity is better associated with the imitations. These results suggest that a disambiguation is needed when judging voice similarity and speaker´s identity and reveal that, in analogy with cartoons in the visual space, acoustical caricatures exists with their own rules of formation and carrying complex identity information.