Can Listeners Hear Who Is Singing? The Development of Voice Category Perception.

Objective And Hypothesis: This study sought to investigate if a small amount of training in identification of voices elicits the development of prototypical vocal categories.

Study Design: This study used a between-group design.

Methods: This study used an ABX paradigm where listeners heard two different singers singing "ah" at the same pitch. Listeners identified which of the two singers was the producer of a third "ah" at a different pitch. Stimuli were recorded from two baritones, two tenors, two mezzo-sopranos, and two sopranos across a 1.5-octave range. Participants were randomly assigned to two groups, one group that received a training session using voices that were different from those in the experimental session, but of the same voice category, and one group that received no training.

Results: Training listeners with voices that are different from those of singers presented in the experiment did not significantly improve the ability to discriminate individual voices of the same voice category, but did significantly improve that ability to discriminate individual voices when the voices being compared were of different voice categories.

Conclusions: Small amounts of purposeful exposure to human voices appear to result in the beginnings of listener voice category formation, providing listeners with prototypical categories that can aid them in discrimination of novel voices of those same categories.