Nine Voices, One Artist: Linguistic and Acoustic Analysis

Voice impersonators possess a flexible voice and thus can change their voice identity. They are able to imitate various people and characters which differ in age, gender, accent and voice quality. State of the art electronic voice conversion systems are not able to successfully mimic their human counterparts as they lack naturalness. To understand why human impersonators are successful and what parameters they rely on to change their voice, we analyze nine voices produced by a professional voice impersonator. We compute different acoustical measures and discuss their linguistic implications. The acoustical measures include pitch, speech rate and formant frequencies. Our results show that differences in the voice identity features such as age and gender are reflected in the acoustic parameters of the impersonations. The analysis is distinguished from previous studies on impersonators in giving full consideration to voice identity features.