Elisabeth Zetterholm

A case study of successful voice imitation

Our voices and speech behaviour give cues to the listener as to our identity. These cues make it possible for the listener to recognise a voice without seeing the speaker. A professional impersonator has to identify the salient and characteristic features of the target voice in order to succeed. The present phonetic study of a Swedish professional impersonator and one of his voice imitations compares the target voice, the voice imitation and the impersonators own voice. The findings indicate that a successful impersonation is the result of the impersonators ability to alter his voice in numerous ways.

Detection of Speaker Characteristics Using Voice Imitation

When recognizing a voice we attend to particular features of the persons speech and voice. Through voice imitation it is possible to investigate which aspects of the human voice need to be altered to successfully mislead the listener. This suggests that voice and speech imitation can be exploited as a methodological tool to find out which features a voice impersonator picks out in the target voice and which features in the human voice are not changed, thereby making it possible to identify the impersonator instead of the target voice. This article examines whether three impersonators, two professional and one amateur, selected the same features and speaker characteristics when imitating the same target speakers and whether they achieved similar degrees of success. The acoustic-auditory results give an insight into how difficult it is to focus on only one or two features when trying to identify one speaker from his voice.

The same or different : A comparison of the rhythmic structure of Swedish and Albanian

Abstract The purpose of this contribution is to give an account of the similarities or dissimilarities of the speech rhythm of Swedish and Albanian. In this study, temporal features were focused on to ascertain rhythmic differences between the two languages. The interest for this study arose when a clear rhythmic variation was observed in the accented Swedish L2 speech produced by L1-speakers of Albanian, namely the lack of attributes like reduction in unstressed syllables. It was thus hypothesised that speakers of L1-Swedish would produce larger variation in length of vocalic and/or consonantal intervals than L1-speakers of Albanian. The recorded material comprised read speech produced by seven L1-speakers of both languages. Various acoustic metrics were applied to analyse the rhythm. Results show differences between Swedish and Albanian speech for both non-normalised and normalised metrics only for the vocalic intervals, but with an unexpected outcome. In that way, larger length variation for vocalic intervals in the Albanian material than in the Swedish material was found. Therefore, the occurrence of reduction phenomena also in Albanian can be stated. These findings contradict the assumption that transfer from L1-Albanian was the reason for lack of reduction in L2-Swedish, as observed previously.