Why are voices so unique and distinguishable? Even a single word can let you recognize someone.
In: Biology
Same with faces, and lots of other things. Your brain is amazingly capable of distinguishing the smallest differences in nearly everything, but obviously only does so in what it thinks is important to. Recognising voices is clearly quite important, so we do. Recognising the intonation and tone in a word is very important if you’re a primary mandarin speaker, and so they can, a natural English speaker would find it difficult to do the same, as they don’t need to, and can you tell the difference between the moo’s of two different cows? Well you better believe that Barry the cow can tell the difference between Maisy and Suzy’s moo’s!
Humans evolved as social animals, so we are typically very good at distinguishing human features, including faces and voices. Physically, our faces and voices are as similar to each other as the faces and voices of sheep, but we can’t distinguish sheep as easily as we can distinguish humans. It is the power of our brains.
When you hear someone speak vowel sounds in particular, the timbre (resonant characteristics) is determined by the physical dimensions of a person’s body, especially their throat, mouth and nose. Your brain learns to decode this to learn about the speaker, just as reverberations provide clues about the room you’re in.
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