A comparison between human perception and a speaker verification system score of a voice imitation.

Abstract

A professional impersonator has been studied when training his voice tomimic two target speakers. A three-fold investigation has been conducted; acomputer-based speaker verification system was used, phonetic-acousticmeasurements were made and a perception test was conducted. Our ideabehind using this type of system is to measure how close to the target voice aprofessional impersonation might be able to reach and to relate this tophonetic-acoustic analyses of the mimic speech and human perception. Thesignificantly increased verification scores and the phonetic-acoustic analysesshow that the impersonator really changes his natural voice and speech in hisimitations. The results of the perception test show that there is no, or only asmall, correlation between the verification system and the listeners whenestimating the voice imitations and how close they are to one of the targetspeakers.