How the brain distinguishes between voice and sound

Researchers at UNIGE and at Maastricht University have demonstrated that the brain adapts to a person's listening intentions by focusing either on a speaker's voice or on the speech sounds that are being uttered. On top: Analysis of main acoustic parameters underlying differences in the voices (speakers) and in the speech sounds (phonemes) in the pseudo-words themselves: high spectral modulations best differentiate the voices (blue spectral profile), and fast temporal modulations (red temporal profile) along with low spectral modulations (red spectral profile) best differentiate the speech sounds. At the bottom: Analysis of neural, fMRI data: during performance of the voice task, the auditory cortex amplifies higher spectral modulations (blue spectral profile), and during performance of the phoneme task, it amplifies fast temporal modulations (red temporal profile) and low spectral modulations (red spectral profile). These amplification profiles are highly similar to the acoustic profiles to differentiate between the voices and the phonemes. UNIGE Is the brain capable of distinguishing a voice from the specific sounds it utters' In an attempt to answer this question, researchers from the University of Geneva (UNIGE), Switzerland, - in collaboration with the University of Maastricht, the Netherlands - devised pseudo-words (words without meaning) spoken by three voices with different pitches. Their aim? To observe how the brain processes this information when it focuses either on the voice or on speech sounds (i.e.