Humans can easily pick out one voice from many. (Credit: Aaron Ama/Shutterstock) (Inside Science) -- If your phone rings and you answer it without looking at the caller ID, it's quite possible that before the person from the other end finishes saying “hello,” you would already know that it was your mother. You could also tell within a second whether she was happy, sad, angry or concerned. Humans can naturally recognize and identify other humans by their voices. A new study published in The Journal of the Acoustical Society of America explored how exactly humans are able to do this. The results may help researchers design more efficient voice recognition software in the future.
“It's a crazy problem for our auditory system to solve -- to figure out how many sounds there are, what they are and where they are,” said Tyler Perrachione, a neuroscientist and linguist from Boston University ...
