title: Vocal caricatures reveal signatures of speaker identity.
abstract: What are the features that impersonators select to elicit a speaker's identity? We built a voice database of public figures (targets) and imitations produced by professional impersonators. They produced one imitation based on their memory of the target (caricature) and another one after listening to the target audio (replica). A set of naive participants then judged identity and similarity of pairs of voices. Identity was better evoked by the caricatures and replicas were perceived to be closer to the targets in terms of voice similarity. We used this data to map relevant acoustic dimensions for each task. Our results indicate that speaker identity is mainly associated with vocal tract features, while perception of voice similarity is related to vocal folds parameters. We therefore show the way in which acoustic caricatures emphasize identity features at the cost of loosing similarity, which allows drawing an analogy with caricatures in the visual space.
authors.affiliation: Dynamical Systems Lab, IFIBA-Physics dept, University of Buenos Aires, Pabellón 1, Ciudad Universitaria, CABA 1428EGA, Argentina.
authors.forename: Sabrina
authors.initials: S
authors.lastname: López
authors.forename: Pablo
authors.initials: P
authors.lastname: Riera
authors.forename: María Florencia
authors.initials: MF
authors.lastname: Assaneo
authors.forename: Manuel
authors.initials: M
authors.lastname: Eguía
authors.forename: Mariano
authors.initials: M
authors.lastname: Sigman
authors.forename: Marcos A
authors.initials: MA
authors.lastname: Trevisan