The Oxford Handbook of Voice Perception

Abstract

The past decades have seen an explosion of research into the psychological, cognitive, neural, biological, and technical mechanisms of voice perception. These mechanisms refer to the general ability to extract information from voices expressed by other living beings or by technical systems. Voice perception research is now a lively area of research, which is studied from many different perspectives ranging from basic research on the acoustic analysis of vocalizations and the neural and cognitive mechanisms, to comparative research across ages, species, and cultures, up to applied research in the field of machine-based generation and decoding of voices, telecommunication, psychiatry, and neurology. This handbook provides a comprehensive and authoritative overview on all the major research fields related to voice perception, in an accessible form, for a broad readership of students, scholars, and researchers. The handbook is divided into seven major parts, each of which deals with a central perspective on voice perception, including what makes the voice special compared to other acoustic signals, the evolutionary and ontogenetic conditions of voice perception, the social cues extracted from voice signals, the machine-based recognition of voices, and the clinical disorders that affect voice perception.