Detecting the presence of vocal disguise in the male voice

Abstract

This research examined the ability of naive and sophisticated listeners to detect extemporaneous disguise in the male voice. The experimental stimuli were sentences uttered in an undisguised and in a freely disguised fashion. The listeners were asked to decide whether a sentence was disguised or undisguised and to rate his/her degree of confidence in each decision. Both naive and sophisticated listeners were able to detect the presence of these particular disguises with a high degree of accuracy and reliability.

Measuring Implicit and Explicit Attitudes Toward Foreign Accented Speech

“…That approach requires one actor to switch accents to read both parts. Because the present study tested a number of dependent variables that included believability and credibility, the risk that the perception of an affected accent would introduce an unwanted confound into the study and influence credulity judgments was deemed too high to use the matched-guise approach (Reich, 1981). Consequently, two actors using their natural, native accents were used instead.…”

Fusing prosodic and acoustic information for speaker recognition

“…Humans are able to recognise speakers even when their voices are disguised (Reich, 1981). This ability, however, is highly dependent on the familiarity of the listener with the speaker.…”

“…It is well-known that human speaker recognition can be quite reliable in small sets of people and specially when the listeners are familiar with the speakers. Even more, humans are able to identify others from voice even when their voices are disguised (Reich, 1981). However, the question arises as to how vulnerable automatic speaker recognition systems are against different voice disguises, such as human imitation or artificial voice conversion.…”

Auditory discrimination of natural speech and synthetic speech used as voice disguise

“…World-wide surveys on forensic speech investigation [15,16] show that the most popular approach employed in most countries are auditory analysis, together with acoustic-phonetic analysis. Reich [4] conducted an experiment where two groups of listeners, naive (undergraduate students) and sophisticated (doctoral students and professors in speech and hearing sciences), discriminated disguised and undisguised speech created by forty male speakers. For the disguised speech, the speakers could freely select the disguise strategies.…”

“…Impostors may change phonation by using glottal fry or whisper voice; change pitch; change accents by using a foreign accent or another dialect; or do anything else in their power to hide their identities. Especially in forensics, the importance of awareness of voice disguise has been emphasised since the 1970s [1][2][3][4][5][6][7][8][9][10]. In the last two decades, researchers have warned of a new type of voice disguise, the use of synthetic speech [11][12][13].…”