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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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.
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