Why are voices so unique and distinguishable? Even a single word can let you recognize someone.
In: Biology
They aren’t always, my brother and I sound so similar on the phone that our parents sometimes need a moment to figure out which of us they’re talking to and we aren’t twins or anything.
Voices are a combination of the sounds your body makes just because of its physical properties, and also how you learn to use that physical instrument. Your accent, cadence, slurring and other features of your voice are all properties that you learned growing up. This is why even identical twins can have pretty different sounding voices.
Voices tend to seem unique and distinguishable because we tend to hear voices from only a small number of people over the course of our lives. For example, for most of us Arnold Schwarzenegger has a super identifiable accent and voice, yet his voice is a result of his learning English as a second language and in fact a lot of people from Austria where he came from have similar accents in English. If you were around these people all the time, you might not think Arnold has such a unique voice.
It’s similar to why we can read facial expressions so well, and it’s hard to make it look perfect, even in modern video games, our brains are really really good at distinguishing vocal sounds and facial expressions.
They just aren’t. Sound is one of those things we think as human are good at but we’re not. Impressionists can fool us and we’re regularly confused by parents and children on the phone.
It’s purely in our heads that we are great at hearing voices. It’s our eyes that do much of the heavy lifting. We can be easily fooled by audio illusions and are tricked by binaural audio. Far and bar are interchangeable based on mouth movements. Go look at audio illusions.
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