Voice Processing and Voice-Identity Recognition

Mathias, Samuel R.; Kriegstein, Katharina von

doi:10.1007/978-3-030-14832-4_7

Cited by 5 publications

(2 citation statements)

References 92 publications

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“…This important feature is directly extracted by the auditory system [31], [32], [33] as early as at the medial geniculate body [34], and is cortically represented in posterior superior temporal lobe networks that include temporal voice areas [14], [35], [36]. These regions may extend across the posterior aspect of the right superior temporal sulcus to the superior temporal pole [29], [37], [38], [39], [40], [41], [42], [43], [44], [45]. Responses may be specific to voice-like stimuli regardless of intelligibility [46], indicating the ability to sustain low-level voice processing.…”

Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Cortical tracking of speakers’ spectral changes predicts selective listening

Constantino,

Caputi

2024

Preprint

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A social scene is particularly informative when people are distinguishable. To understand somebody amid a 'cocktail party' chatter, we automatically index their voice. This ability is underpinned by parallel processing of vocal spectral contours from speech sounds, but it has not yet been established how this occurs in the brain's cortex. We investigate single-trial neural tracking of slow modulations in speech formants using electroencephalography. Participants briefly listened to unfamiliar single speakers, and in addition, they performed a cocktail party comprehension task. Quantified through stimulus reconstruction methods, robust tracking was found in neural responses to slow (delta-theta range) modulations of the fourth and fifth formant band contours equivalent to the 3.5-5 KHz audible range. Instantaneous inter-formant spacing (Delta-F), which also yields indexical information from the vocal tract, was similarly decodable. Moreover, EEG evidence of listeners' spectral tracking abilities predicted their chances of succeeding at selective listening when faced with two-speaker speech mixtures. In summary, the results indicate that the communicating brain can rely on locking of cortical rhythms to major changes led by upper resonances of the vocal tract. Their corresponding articulatory mechanics hence continuously issue a fundamental credential for listeners to target in real time.

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Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Cortical tracking of speakers’ spectral changes predicts selective listening

Constantino,

Caputi

2024

Preprint

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“…Vocalizations are a crucial social signal and a fundamental driver of human and animal behavior. Humans and other animals can easily distinguish con-specific vocalizations from other complex sounds in their acoustic environment [ 1 , 2 ] and can deduce demographic, emotional, and behavioral intentions from voice [ 3 ]. These voice recognition abilities begin to develop prenatally [ 4 ], precede development of linguistic abilities [ 5 ], and are formed through the processing of acoustic and paralinguistic aspects of voice [ 6 ].…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Neural responses in human superior temporal cortex support coding of voice representations

et al. 2022

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The ability to recognize abstract features of voice during auditory perception is an intricate feat of human audition. For the listener, this occurs in near-automatic fashion to seamlessly extract complex cues from a highly variable auditory signal. Voice perception depends on specialized regions of auditory cortex, including superior temporal gyrus (STG) and superior temporal sulcus (STS). However, the nature of voice encoding at the cortical level remains poorly understood. We leverage intracerebral recordings across human auditory cortex during presentation of voice and nonvoice acoustic stimuli to examine voice encoding at the cortical level in 8 patient-participants undergoing epilepsy surgery evaluation. We show that voice selectivity increases along the auditory hierarchy from supratemporal plane (STP) to the STG and STS. Results show accurate decoding of vocalizations from human auditory cortical activity even in the complete absence of linguistic content. These findings show an early, less-selective temporal window of neural activity in the STG and STS followed by a sustained, strongly voice-selective window. Encoding models demonstrate divergence in the encoding of acoustic features along the auditory hierarchy, wherein STG/STS responses are best explained by voice category and acoustics, as opposed to acoustic features of voice stimuli alone. This is in contrast to neural activity recorded from STP, in which responses were accounted for by acoustic features. These findings support a model of voice perception that engages categorical encoding mechanisms within STG and STS to facilitate feature extraction.

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Cortical tracking of speakers’ spectral changes predicts selective listening

Cervantes Constantino,

Caputi

2024

Cerebral Cortex

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A social scene is particularly informative when people are distinguishable. To understand somebody amid a “cocktail party” chatter, we automatically index their voice. This ability is underpinned by parallel processing of vocal spectral contours from speech sounds, but it has not yet been established how this occurs in the brain’s cortex. We investigate single-trial neural tracking of slow frequency modulations in speech using electroencephalography. Participants briefly listened to unfamiliar single speakers, and in addition, they performed a cocktail party comprehension task. Quantified through stimulus reconstruction methods, robust tracking was found in neural responses to slow (delta-theta range) modulations of frequency contours in the fourth and fifth formant band, equivalent to the 3.5–5 KHz audible range. The spectral spacing between neighboring instantaneous frequency contours (ΔF), which also yields indexical information from the vocal tract, was similarly decodable. Moreover, EEG evidence of listeners’ spectral tracking abilities predicted their chances of succeeding at selective listening when faced with two-speaker speech mixtures. In summary, the results indicate that the communicating brain can rely on locking of cortical rhythms to major changes led by upper resonances of the vocal tract. Their corresponding articulatory mechanics hence continuously issue a fundamental credential for listeners to target in real time.

show abstract

Voice Processing and Voice-Identity Recognition

Cited by 5 publications

References 92 publications

Cortical tracking of speakers’ spectral changes predicts selective listening

Cortical tracking of speakers’ spectral changes predicts selective listening

Neural responses in human superior temporal cortex support coding of voice representations

Cortical tracking of speakers’ spectral changes predicts selective listening

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