Question: What's the most exciting thing you have discovered during in your research?

Nadine Lavan answered on 8 Jan 2018:

Not sure if it counts as exciting but it’s probably my favourite finding: our voices can sound so different from moment to moment, that listeners (who are not familiar with a voice) can have a lot of trouble figuring out that two recordings come from the same person and not from two different people. Just imagine you heard two sound clips of a person you don’t know: one where they are just saying different vowels (like “aah aah aah” or “eee eeee”) and the second one where they are laughing. A single voice will sound very different from one recording to the next. I’ve run studies to show exactly that: if you don’t know the voice, you really can’t work out whether these two recordings have got the voice of only one or two people in it. I was really surprised at the fact that people were so bad at this task! That’s however when you only have the voice to go on. Usually – and luckily for us given how bad we seem to be at this! – we do however have a face to go with the voice, when we are speaking to someone in person, which makes things easier. And when speaking to someone, we usually also have listened to the whole conversation, so changes in their voice make sense within that context.