Same speaker - different voices. A study of one impersonator and some of his different imitations.

Abstract

One impersonator and a number of his different voice imitations have been studied in order to gain some insights into the flexibility of the human voice and speech. A whole text unit and one selected word, which occur in all the recordings, have been analyzed and a comparison made between the different recordings. Both auditory and acoustic analyses have been attempted. The results indicate that this impersonator is able to adopt a range of articulatory-phonetic configurations in order to achieve the target speakers. This very fact raises questions concerning features that are hard to change in the voice and the possibility to find some kind of long-term signature for one speaker. 1.