Voice line-ups: Speakers’ F0 values influence the reliability of voice recognitions

Abstract

This paper reports a voice line-up experiment. It was designed to explore whether some voices are easier to remember and recognise than others, and whether some listeners are better at recognising voices than others. The results suggest that 'common' voices, based on mean fundamental frequency values, are harder to remember and recognise than 'less common' voices. The results also suggest that some people are better at remembering and recognising voices than others. The results show that after one week of retention the mean percentage of correct identifications is 65%. However, the 'less common' voice is correctly recognised at 74%, whereas the 'common' voice is only correctly identified in 56% of the cases. The results not only suggest that some voices are easier to remember and recognise than others, but they also imply individual differences in listeners' abilities to recognise voices. It turns out that it was the same listeners who had difficulties making the correct identifications in the different line-ups. An implicational hierarchy may be proposed, in which the listeners who were not able to correctly identify the 'less common' voice also had problems with identifying the 'common' voice. The results also show that the listeners' confidence in their own ability to recognise the target voices is not a reliable measure of voice recognition performance.