Who is singing? Voice recognition from spoken versus sung speech

Abstract

Singing is socially important but constrains voice acoustics, potentially masking certain aspects of vocal identity. Little is known about how well listeners extract talker details from sung speech or identify talkers across the sung and spoken modalities. Here, listeners (n = 149) were trained to recognize sung or spoken voices and then tested on their identification of these voices in both modalities. Learning vocal identities was initially easier through speech than song. At test, cross-modality voice recognition was above chance, but weaker than within-modality recognition. We conclude that talker information is accessible in sung speech, despite acoustic constraints in song.