Question: Could you expand on what you are researching?

Nadine Lavan answered on 9 Jan 2018:

Sure! I am very broadly interesting in what people can get out of voices other than the things they are saying. When we speak, we convey a lot of information about ourselves in our voices: not only in what we are saying in our words but also how we are saying them. From that, listeners can get an idea of our age, sex, identity, intentions and emotions (to name just a few things we can tell from voices)!). These are the kinds of things I am interested in. So, in the past, I’ve for example been interested in laughter research in as part of my work with Sophie – laughter happens all the time and not that many people have actually researched it! For that I’ve mainly looked at whether people can figure out when someone is genuinely laughing as opposed to when they are just faking it (people are very good that this!).

More recently, I’ve started looking at how we can recognise other people from their voices only: it seems obvious to us that we can recognise our friends, celebrities and family from their voices only, but if you think about it, this is actually a rather amazing feat: a person’s voice sounds different from situation to situation. For example, when I’m talking to a dog, I sound different than when I’m giving a talk (I hope…) and when I laugh my voice will sound very different to when I’m speaking. So, when we recognise someone, we have worked out who they are despite these massive differences in how their voice sounds and I’ve been interested how we can do this and have tried to figure out under which circumstances we are quite good at this and in which situations it’s less easy to work out who were are listening to!