I can walk around all day and not encounter a voice of someone who sounds like someone else I know, yet if I was facing away from someone I knew and heard their voice, I’d likely turn around at the sound of it. There are times where I’ll see faces and think they look like someone I know, but I don’t think I’ve ever thought to myself or commented to someone that they sound like someone I know. I don’t think I’ve ever heard someone who’s voice sounds like a celebrity that I’d recognize, unless they’re doing an intentional impression.
Does the brain not seek out similar voices in the same way it may faces? Is the brain able to identify people that distinctly that it can remember their exact voice pattern and discern it from others?
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There’s just so many variables. A person’s height, size of their chest, their lungs, their vocal chords not to mention accents and dialect which can change the timbre or manner in which one speaks. Voices aren’t completely unique of course but the chances of meeting someone with the same voice as you is pretty ridiculous based on the amount of variables. It’s more likely to be someone in your family or from your area than just a random you meet somewhere
The answer is twofold. First: Humans are social creatures and have developed to be able to distinguish between minute details of the voice. For other animals we may very well sound all pretty much sound alike.
And the second thing is that at the point of origin (your vocal chords) most voices sound very similar but the soundwaves bounce of all of your fleshy walls in a very unique pattern that only your body has, always changing them ever so slightly until your voice sounds like you.
Of course size of the vocal chords matter as well for the frequenzy in which they vibrate.
Fun fact: you Sound different to yourself than to others because you also hear yourself over your vibrating skull bones. So the voice you hear when you are recording yourself is how other people hear you.
There is a lot of variation in people’s voices because people have different vocal cords. The size, tension, and thickness of a person’s vocal cords can create a lot of variation in sound. Additionally, the way a person uses their voice can also create variation. For example, some people speak in a higher pitch than others, and some people have more nasally sounding voices.
As others say, I think the biggest factor isn’t the voice itself, but the way that we speak. Speaking speak, accent, choice of words, tone of voice. Add all those together along with having to have the exact same voice, then you’d have difficulty finding 2 people who sound similar enough to confuse them.
Just to add together what other people are already saying here, how you sound is a combination of your particular anatomy and your particular patterns of articulation.
To start, your vocal folds are a bit differen than mine. Think of your vocal folds as guitar strings. Just as plucking a long, fat string creates a different sound than plucking a short, thin string (think of a thin string on the same guitar that you’ve maybe shortened by pressing on a fret), speaking with big fat vocal cords produces a different sound than speaking with short skinny vocal folds. This, for example, is how you change pitch.
Not only your vocal folds, but the rest of your vocal tract is specific to you, so your voice resonates differently. Think of your vocal tract (pharynx, nasal cavities, cheeks, hard/soft palate) as the body of your guitar. What happens AFTER you pluck the string? It resonates off the guitar walls, and will do so entirely differently off ukelele walls or banjo walls or whatever walls that are different shapes and sizes. Your voice does the same off your cheeks, palate, pharyngeal walls, etc.
So that’s a very simplified description of anatomy. But people are also cool in that we can not only pluck strings but actually CHANGE THE SHAPE OF OUR GUITAR. Meaning we can (to some extent) not only choose our pitch with our vocal folds, but we can adjust somewhat the shape of our vocal tract and articulators (as though we could change the shape of our guitar body in real time while we are producing sounds). For example, you can move your velum and push your voice to be more nasal, vibrate lower down to to have more glottal friction, move your tongue to make sounds more palatal, make certain sounds more dental or alveolar by moving the tip of your tongue. If you do this in very specific ways (changing, say, the shape of your vowels or altering the manner of articulation of certain consonants) you can even create specific patterns of phonemes that we identify with different “accents”. But even if two of us speak with the same “accent” pattern, it will still resonate off your anatomy in particular and not mine, so it will sound like “you” speaking with that accent and not me.
I guy got a voice box transplant from a stranger after 20 years with no voice, yet he sounds similar to his father when he speaks. It seems much of the voice comes from the shape of your throat/mouth/etc.
“Heidler recovered his voice, which he says now sounds a bit like his father’s voice, and 13 years later “continues well today,” Strome said.”
[source](https://www.google.com/amp/s/abcnews.go.com/amp/Health/WellnessNews/voice-box-transplant-recipient-talks-abc-news/story%3fid=12649144)
I’m faceblind which means I have a hard time recognizing faces; mine’s mild but some folks aren’t able to recognise their kids; what this means is I’m often able to place people by their voices before I can match up the face.
The way people sound is not just down to their voice but also to the way they talk, the language, the accent, the enunciation, their vocabulary etc. That means that you’ve probably heard people with similar or identical voices but didn’t realise it since they spoke differently. This is something that becomes apparent when people are doing imitations, where even if their voice is off if they’re copying another person’s way of speech accurately they end up sounding like them a lot, or with singing where people generally tend to try to imitate the song exactly as sung by the original performer, even if that means assuming a different accent.
I for example, have come across 3-4 instances of people who speak and sound exactly like others I know. I know it’s anecdotal but it’s definitely possible. Their voices were similar but more specifically the way they spoke was identical. Their mouth shape was the same and the way they pronounced words and how their mouth and lips moved was the same, so they sounded the same. It’s also noteworthy that they usually also had similar height and build though that’s less important. Ans it’s uncanny because when two people sound exactly the same it feels as if they also look the same even though if you really look you can see they don’t except for their mouths.
Every trumpet sounds mostly the same when played by the same person, and the same trumpet sounds different for each person that plays it.
The voice is just a human’s natural musical instrument… and every person plays theirs differently… even when it closely resembles someone else’s voice in range and tambre… and it’s also why a skilled impressionist can create the illusion of sounding like another person.
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