The Fish, The Echo, The Ghost: A Theory of Voice
From ancient fish gills to AI's uncanny valley, discover the hidden evolution and future of the human voice.
ReadyA priest stands atop the Temple of the Inscriptions in the ancient Mayan city of Palenque. Without a microphone, without any modern amplification, his voice carries clearly across the grand plaza, reaching hundreds. The secret is not in his lungs, but in the stone itself, an architecture designed as a colossal public address system.
Thousands of miles away and centuries later, a man named Tim Storms sings a note so low it registers at 0.189 hertz. It’s a G-negative-7, a frequency eight octaves below the lowest G on a piano. You cannot hear it. No human can. It exists beyond our perception, yet it is undeniably a product of the human voice.
From architectural marvels to the physical limits of sound, the voice is more than just the noise we make. It’s a biological inheritance from ancient fish, a neurological symphony, and a technology that is reshaping our future. It’s the carrier of our identity, and sometimes, the source of our deepest unease.
The Echo of a Word
To get a handle on voice, we have to follow its sound back through time. The word itself is a traveler, starting its journey as a whisper in Proto-Indo-European: the root _wekʷ-_, meaning “to speak” or “to utter.” This single, ancient seed sprouted across continents, blossoming into Sanskrit vāc and Ancient Greek óps.
It found its way into Latin as _vōx_, a powerhouse of a word that meant everything from the physical sound to the cry, the call, the speech, and even the language itself. From this Latin root, we get a whole choir of modern English words: vocal, vowel, advocate (literally “to call to”), and the wonderfully descriptive vociferous—“voice-bearing.”
The word arrived in English around the late 13th century, courtesy of the Norman French voiz. Its arrival was so definitive that it pushed native Old English words for the same concept, like steven and reord, into the shadows of linguistic history. The French won the battle for our mouths.
A Valve, a Descent, and a Wire
The story of the human voice begins not with a word, but with a gulp. The fundamental mechanism we use to speak—a valve in our throat that opens and closes—is a direct inheritance from ancient fish. Its original job, as evolutionary biologist John Colapinto notes, was brutally simple: keep water out of the lungs. Survival first, sermons later.
For millions of years, this simple valve was refined. A critical turning point, identified in a landmark 2022 Science study, came when our hominin ancestors lost the thin, ribbon-like vocal membranes that other primates still possess. This anatomical streamlining, a simplification, paradoxically gave us the stable, clear, and less noisy vocal control necessary for the complexities of speech and song.
Our upright posture also forced our larynx to drop lower in the throat than in other primates. This created a longer pharynx, an extended resonant cavity that acts like the body of a violin, amplifying and enriching the sounds we can make. This unique anatomical arrangement is the hardware on which language runs.
For millennia, that hardware’s range was limited by lung power. Then, in 1876, a wire changed everything. Alexander Graham Bell’s first telephone call—“Mr. Watson, come here, I want to see you”—mechanically severed the link between proximity and conversation. The voice could now travel at the speed of electricity, a miracle we spent the next century refining from rotary switchboards to satellites that bounce our whispers around the planet.
The Symphony Inside
When you decide to speak, you trigger a neurological performance of breathtaking speed and precision. Your brain isn't just sending a single command; it’s conducting an orchestra of breath, vibration, and articulation. The lungs provide the air, the vocal folds in the larynx buzz to create the raw sound, and your tongue, palate, and lips sculpt that buzz into the phonemes of language.
But our brains don't just produce voice; they are exquisitely tuned to perceive it. Research published in PLOS Biology in 2022 pinpointed specific neighborhoods in our auditory cortex—the superior temporal gyrus and superior temporal sulcus—that are voice-processing specialists. They don’t just hear a sound; they hear a voice, a category of sound loaded with unique social meaning.
This is especially true for emotion. The melody of speech, its emotional prosody, lights up a network connecting our temporal and frontal lobes. We decode feeling from pitch, tempo, and volume in milliseconds. But what happens when this intricate recognition system, the one that ties a voice to a person, shatters?
This brings us to the strange and isolating world of phonagnosia. The term is a modern concoction from Greek: phōnē for “voice” and agnōsia for “not knowing.” It is, quite literally, the state of not knowing voices. It is for the ears what face blindness (prosopagnosia) is for the eyes. A person with phonagnosia can understand every word you say. They can detect your anger, joy, or sadness from your tone. But they cannot tell if it’s you speaking, or a complete stranger.
One of the most studied cases involved a woman known as 'Patient AB.' After damage to her right temporoparietal cortex, she lost the ability to recognize anyone by their voice—her husband, her children, even herself on a recording. She described these once-familiar sounds as belonging to a stranger. Her world was suddenly populated by anonymous speakers, the vocal identity of everyone she loved erased. Neuroimaging studies confirm this isn't a hearing problem; it's a recognition problem. The brain’s “voice-selective” areas, particularly in the right hemisphere’s superior temporal gyrus, are the dedicated facial recognition software for sound. When this module is damaged, the link between a voice and its owner is severed. It’s a chilling reminder that our sense of connection to others hangs by a delicate neurological thread.
Voices at the Edge
Some voices push the boundaries of human biology. In 2000, teaching assistant Jill Drake unleashed a scream measured at 129 decibels, louder than a rock concert and past the threshold of pain. At the other extreme is Tim Storms, whose ten-octave range plummets into that sub-audible territory only machines can detect.
The brain’s own quirks provide other examples. A stroke can sometimes create a tragic separation between speech and song. A person may be unable to form a simple sentence but can still sing an entire lyric flawlessly. This suggests that speaking, largely a left-hemisphere activity for most, and singing, which leans more on the right, travel on different neural highways.
But the voice can be used for something even more radical than communication. It can be a tool to build a picture of the world in total darkness. This is the reality of human echolocation. The word itself is a fusion of Greek ēkhō, “sound,” and Latin locus, “place.” It is the act of locating by echo. Most famously practiced by Daniel Kish, who has been blind since he was 13 months old, this technique turns the human mouth into a sophisticated sonar device.
By producing sharp, consistent tongue clicks and listening intently to the returning echoes, Kish and other practitioners can construct a detailed mental map of their surroundings. They can discern the size, shape, distance, and even texture of objects around them—a lamppost, a parked car, a dense bush. Kish, who founded the nonprofit World Access for the Blind, has used this skill to hike alone and even ride a bicycle through traffic. This isn't a superpower; it's a testament to profound neuroplasticity. fMRI studies by researchers like Lore Thaler have shown that for expert echolocators, these sound-based signals aren't processed just in the auditory cortex. They are routed to the brain’s visual cortex, the very area that in a sighted person processes light from the eyes. The brain, deprived of one sense, rewires itself to “see” with sound. It’s a powerful demonstration that the voice can be repurposed from a tool of expression into a tool of perception.
The Universal Instrument
The voice is the original musical instrument, a pillar of cultural expression. In the grasslands of Siberia, Tuvan throat singers master a technique called Khöömei, manipulating their vocal folds to produce multiple, simultaneous pitches—a low drone and a high, whistling melody all from one mouth.
We extend this idea of a unique sonic personality beyond our own bodies. We speak of an author's “voice” to describe their distinct literary style. And we talk about an instrument having a voice, which leads to the concept of timbre. The word’s history is a story in itself, coming to English from the French word for a “bell,” which in turn traces back to the Greek tympanon, a “drum.” From a percussive strike to a rich, sustained quality, the word’s evolution mirrors our growing understanding of sound.
Timbre is the reason a flute and a violin playing the same note at the same volume sound completely different. It is the sonic fingerprint of an instrument. This fingerprint is created by two main things: the harmonic content—the complex mix of higher, quieter frequencies called overtones that ride on top of the main note—and the sound’s envelope, its attack, sustain, and decay. A piano’s percussive attack is different from a cello’s slow, bowed swell. These acoustic properties are what our brains interpret as character. We use evocative, human words—a saxophone’s “sultry” voice, a trumpet’s “brassy” one. The great trumpeter Miles Davis, for example, cultivated a timbre so personal it was as recognizable as his face. Using a Harmon mute and his unique breath control, he created a cool, introspective, almost fragile sound that became the voice of an entire jazz movement. Neuroscience shows that our auditory cortex analyzes these complex acoustic signals with incredible sophistication, allowing us to build a mental library of sonic identities, for both people and the instruments they play.
The Digital Echo
Today, the voice is at the center of an AI revolution. Companies like ElevenLabs and Google DeepMind have created neural networks that can generate synthetic speech almost indistinguishable from our own. These AI models capture the subtle intonations, rhythms, and emotional colors of human speech, and can clone a specific person’s voice from just a few seconds of audio.
This technology is rapidly transforming industries, from automated audiobooks to hyper-personalized advertising. But as these synthetic voices approach perfection, they risk stumbling into a strange psychological pitfall: the uncanny valley of synthetic speech. The term was coined in 1970 by Japanese roboticist Masahiro Mori to describe the wave of revulsion we feel when a robot or animation is almost, but not quite, perfectly human.
When an AI voice is clearly robotic, we accept it. When it becomes more human-like, our empathy increases. But in that zone of near-perfection, tiny flaws—an unnatural pause, a slightly off-pitch inflection, a lack of subtle breath sounds—become monstrous. The voice sounds wrong, creepy, even diseased. Our brains, finely tuned for authentic human signals, detect a mismatch. The attempt at mimicry fails, triggering a primal sense of unease. Neuroscientifically, this is thought to be a conflict in the brain’s categorization centers, a cognitive dissonance that flags the stimulus as a potential threat. The amygdala, our internal smoke detector, may register an alarm. As we stand on the cusp of perfectly replicated human voices, the uncanny valley serves as a potent reminder that authenticity is more than just acoustic data. It’s a complex biological and psychological signal we’ve been decoding for millennia.
The Unamplified Truth
We return to that priest in Palenque, his voice filling the plaza not with technology, but with a deep understanding of the world’s natural acoustics. He was an ancient audio engineer, shaping his environment to carry his words, to give his voice power.
And we think of Tim Storms, producing a sound the human ear cannot even register, a voice exploring a physical reality beyond our senses. Between the perfectly amplified and the perfectly inaudible lies the story of the human voice. It is an evolutionary accident born from a fish’s need to keep from drowning, a neurological marvel that builds our social world, and now, a digital ghost we are teaching to speak. It is the most primal and personal of instruments, and its greatest performances are yet to come.
[INTRO MUSIC: Bright, curious, a mix of acoustic plucking and subtle electronic beats that resolves into a warm, welcoming theme] [CAROLINE]: A priest stands on top of a temple in the ancient Mayan city of Palenque. There’s no microphone, no speaker system. And yet, his voice carries across the entire plaza, clear as a bell, reaching hundreds. The secret isn't in his lungs. It's in the stone. [SOUND of a very, very low hum, almost a vibration] [CAROLINE]: Now, imagine a man in a soundproof room singing a note so low, it's eight octaves below the lowest G on a piano. You can’t hear it. In fact, no human can. It exists beyond our perception, but it is, undeniably, a product of the human voice. [CAROLINE]: From architecture that acts like a PA system to sounds that defy our senses, the voice is… well, it’s more than just the noise we make. It's our most personal instrument, a neurological symphony, and a technology that is radically reshaping our future. Today on The Grand Unified Theory of X: Voice. [THEME MUSIC SWELLS AND FADES] [TIMING: ~1:00] [CAROLINE]: I am Dr. Caroline Wallis, and today we are diving deep into the sound of being human. To help us unpack this, we have two very special guests. First, a brilliant mind from Stanford whose lab is affectionately known as 'The Sound Garden.' He is the Professor of Auditory Neuroscience and Psychoacoustics, Dr. Kenji Tanaka. Kenji, welcome. [KENJI]: Thank you, Caroline. It’s a pleasure. The air in this studio has a lovely, warm resonance, by the way. [CAROLINE]: [Laughs] I knew you’d notice. And, dialing in from Asheville, North Carolina, is a guest who has been analyzing my own voice since my very first cry—and who still audits my tax returns. Welcome to the show, Mom. [MARTHA]: Hello, dear. Are you remembering to deduct your home office expenses? And who is this doctor? Is he board certified? [CAROLINE]: He is, Mom. And yes. Okay—let’s start where we always do: the word itself. The word 'voice' is a traveler. It began as a tiny seed in Proto-Indo-European, a root that sounded like *wekʷ-*, meaning 'to speak.' [KENJI]: And that root is everywhere. It pops up in Sanskrit as 'vāc' and in Latin as 'vōx.' [CAROLINE]: Exactly! And that Latin 'vōx' was a powerhouse. It meant the sound, the cry, the call, the speech… even the language itself. We get a whole choir of words from it: vocal, vowel, advocate—literally 'to call to'—and one of my favorites, vociferous. [MARTHA]: Vocation, too, right? Like a calling? [CAROLINE]: That’s it! See? You’re a natural. When the word 'voice' arrived in English from French in the 13th century, it was so popular it basically kicked the Old English words for the same thing, like 'steven,' right out the door. [KENJI]: A hostile takeover, linguistically speaking. [CAROLINE]: [Laughs] Precisely. But the history of the thing itself, the physical voice, starts long before any words. [TIMING: ~3:00] [CAROLINE]: Okay so—and stick with me here—the story of your voice begins with a fish trying not to drown. [MARTHA]: I’m sorry, a what now? [CAROLINE]: A fish! The basic mechanism we use to speak, this little valve in our throat, is a direct evolutionary hand-me-down. Its original job was just to slam shut to keep water out of the lungs. Survival first, singing later. [KENJI]: It’s a beautiful example of evolutionary repurposing. What’s fascinating is what we *lost* to gain our voice. A 2022 study in the journal *Science* showed that our hominin ancestors, alone among primates, lost these thin, ribbon-like vocal membranes. It was an anatomical simplification that, paradoxically, gave us much more stable and clear vocal control. We traded complexity for clarity. [CAROLINE]: And our posture helped too! Standing upright forced our larynx, our voice box, to drop lower in the throat than in other apes. That created a longer pharynx, which acts like the resonant body of a cello, amplifying our sound. For millennia, that was it. The voice was limited by lung power. Then, in 1876, a wire changed everything. Alexander Graham Bell makes that first call: 'Mr. Watson, come here, I want to see you.' [MARTHA]: And the phone bills started. I remember when long-distance was a dollar a minute. You kids have no idea. [CAROLINE]: [Chuckles] True. That call severed the link between proximity and conversation. Suddenly, the voice could travel at the speed of electricity, a process we spent the next century refining from switchboards to satellites. [TIMING: ~5:00] [CAROLINE]: But all of that technology just transmits a signal that starts with an incredible neurological performance. Kenji, walk us through it. What happens in the brain when we speak? [KENJI]: It’s a symphony conducted at lightning speed. The brain coordinates breath from the lungs, the vibration of the vocal folds to create the raw buzz, and then the articulation—shaping that buzz into words. But the truly amazing part is how our brains *perceive* voice. It's not just another sound. [CAROLINE]: Right, research from 2022 in *PLOS Biology* found these specific zones in the auditory cortex—the superior temporal gyrus and sulcus—that are voice specialists. They treat the human voice as its own special category, loaded with social meaning. [KENJI]: Precisely. And this is especially true for emotion. The brain is exquisitely tuned to emotional prosody—the melody of speech. The pitch, the tempo, the volume. It’s how we hear not just *what* someone says, but how they *feel*. But it’s also a system that can break down in very specific, and very strange, ways. [CAROLINE]: Which brings us to a condition that sounds like something out of science fiction: phonagnosia. [MARTHA]: Phona-what? [CAROLINE]: Phonagnosia. From the Greek 'phōnē,' for voice, and 'agnōsia,' for 'not knowing.' It is, literally, not knowing voices. It’s for your ears what face blindness is for your eyes. [KENJI]: A person with phonagnosia can understand every word you say. They can hear the happiness or sadness in your tone. But they cannot identify who is speaking. A spouse of fifty years sounds the same as a stranger on the street. [MARTHA]: You’re joking. So I could be on the phone with Caroline and not know it’s her? [CAROLINE]: Exactly. There's a famous case study of a woman known as Patient AB. After damage to her right temporoparietal cortex, she lost the ability to recognize anyone by their voice. Her husband, her children… she even described her own voice on a recording as belonging to a stranger. The vocal identity of everyone she loved was just—erased. [KENJI]: And neuroimaging confirms this isn't a hearing problem. It's a recognition problem. Those voice-selective areas, especially in the right hemisphere, are like facial recognition software for sound. When that specific module is damaged, the link between a voice and its owner is cleanly severed. It’s a chilling reminder that our sense of who people are is built on these very fragile, very specific neural pathways. [TIMING: ~8:30] [CAROLINE]: Some voices, of course, are memorable because they push the very limits of biology. In 2000, a teacher named Jill Drake produced a scream measured at 129 decibels. That’s louder than an AC/DC concert. [KENJI]: Then you have the other extreme, Tim Storms, the man with the 10-octave range whose lowest notes are completely inaudible to us. His voice exists in a physical reality our senses can't access. [CAROLINE]: And the brain itself can create these wild divisions. We see it in stroke survivors who might lose the ability to speak but can still sing perfectly. It suggests that for most people, speaking is more of a left-hemisphere job, while singing leans more on the right. Two different highways for vocal expression. [MARTHA]: My cousin Earl had a stroke. He couldn't say much, but he could hum 'Amazing Grace' note for note. We never understood that. [CAROLINE]: That’s a perfect example, Mom. But the voice can be used for something even more radical than communication. It can be used to see. [KENJI]: Ah, human echolocation. This is one of the most beautiful examples of neuroplasticity we have. [CAROLINE]: For anyone who hasn't heard of this, some blind individuals have taught themselves to navigate the world by making sharp clicking sounds with their tongue and interpreting the echoes. The most famous practitioner is a man named Daniel Kish. He’s been blind since he was 13 months old. [MARTHA]: So he clicks, like a… a bat? [KENJI]: Exactly like a bat. By listening to the way those clicks bounce off objects, he can construct an incredibly detailed 3D map of his surroundings in his mind. He can discern size, shape, distance, even the texture of things. Is it a lamppost or a tree? A metal car or a wooden fence? [CAROLINE]: He can ride a bicycle through traffic using this. He hikes alone in the wilderness. It’s astounding. [MARTHA]: So he can tell a car from a bicycle just by the sound bouncing back? That seems impossible. [KENJI]: It seems impossible, but the brain makes it possible! fMRI studies on expert echolocators show something breathtaking. The echoes aren't just processed in the auditory cortex. The signals get re-routed to his visual cortex—the very part of the brain that, in a sighted person, processes light. His brain has rewired itself to *see* with sound. The voice, or in this case a click, becomes a tool not of expression, but of perception. [TIMING: ~12:00] [CAROLINE]: That idea of the voice as an instrument is fundamental to human culture. You see these incredible specialized techniques, like Tuvan throat singing, where a single person can produce multiple pitches at once—a low drone and a high, whistling melody, all from one mouth. [KENJI]: A stunning feat of muscular control. [CAROLINE]: It is. And we extend this idea of a unique sonic personality beyond ourselves. We talk about an author's 'voice.' And we say an instrument has a 'voice.' A saxophone can be sultry, a trumpet brassy. Kenji, what are we actually hearing when we say that? [KENJI]: We're hearing its timbre. The word comes from the French for 'bell,' and before that the Greek for 'drum.' Timbre—pronounced TAM-ber—is the sonic fingerprint of an instrument. It’s why a flute and a violin playing the exact same note at the same volume sound completely different. [CAROLINE]: And what creates that fingerprint? [KENJI]: It’s all about the overtones! When a violin string vibrates, it doesn't just produce one frequency, the main note. It produces a whole series of quieter, higher-pitched frequencies called harmonics. The specific recipe of these overtones creates the instrument's unique character. A violin is rich in certain overtones, a clarinet in others. That complex recipe is its timbre. It’s what our brain interprets as its 'voice.' [MARTHA]: So that’s why my old upright piano sounds so clunky compared to a grand piano. It has bad overtones? [KENJI]: [Delighted] Precisely, Martha! Its harmonic series is likely less rich. You see it perfectly in musicians like the trumpeter Miles Davis. His 'voice' was unmistakable. He used a special mute and his unique breath control to create this cool, fragile, introspective sound. It wasn't just the notes he played; it was the *quality* of the sound—the timbre. It became his signature, as recognizable as a human voice. [TIMING: ~15:00] [CAROLINE]: And now, our library of sonic identities is getting a new, very strange wing. The voice is at the center of the AI revolution. Companies like ElevenLabs can now generate synthetic speech that is almost indistinguishable from a human's. [KENJI]: They can capture the subtle intonations, the pacing, the emotional color. They can even clone a specific person's voice from just a few seconds of audio. [CAROLINE]: Which is incredible, but as these voices get closer to perfect, they risk falling into a strange psychological pitfall. It's called the Uncanny Valley. [MARTHA]: Oh, I think I’ve heard of this. It’s about those creepy-looking robots, right? [CAROLINE]: That’s the one. The term was coined in 1970 by roboticist Masahiro Mori. He noticed that as a robot becomes more human-like, our empathy increases… but only up to a point. When it gets *almost* perfect, but something is slightly off, our affinity plummets into a valley of revulsion. [KENJI]: And this applies powerfully to voice. When an AI voice is clearly a robot, we're fine. But when it’s 99% human, that last 1% of imperfection becomes monstrous. A slightly unnatural pause, an inflection that doesn't quite match the emotion… it makes our skin crawl. [MARTHA]: I got a robocall the other day, but the voice sounded so real, so friendly. And then it asked about my car's extended warranty with the exact same cheerful tone for the fifth time, and I just… I got the shivers. It was deeply unsettling. [CAROLINE]: That’s the uncanny valley right there! Your brain, an expert at decoding authentic human signals, detected a mismatch. [KENJI]: Neurologically, we think this triggers a kind of cognitive dissonance. The brain is struggling to categorize the voice—is it human or not? That ambiguity can activate the amygdala, our brain's threat detector. It flags the voice as potentially deceptive or even diseased. It’s a primal, protective response. [TIMING: ~18:30] [CAROLINE]: So, where does the voice go from here? What's the future, Kenji? [KENJI]: The line between human and artificial will continue to blur. We’ll have AI companions, coaches, creators. This will force us to confront really deep questions about authenticity and what it means to have a 'real' conversation. [CAROLINE]: And security, too. Voice biometrics—using your unique vocal pattern as a key—will become more common. [KENJI]: Absolutely. And in medicine, the potential is enormous. Sophisticated vocal analysis could one day diagnose neurological diseases like Parkinson's or even depression, just by listening for subtle changes in your speech patterns. [MARTHA]: So your doctor will just listen to you talk and know if you’re sick? That sounds… efficient, I suppose. [CAROLINE]: And for those who have lost their voice, technology will offer more than just a robotic text-to-speech device. It will be about translating brain signals directly into synthesized speech that is personalized, that carries the user's intended emotion. Giving people back not just a voice, but *their* voice. [TIMING: ~20:30] [CAROLINE]: Which brings us back to where we started. [CAROLINE]: We have the priest in Palenque, using the hard science of acoustics to shape the physical world to carry his words. He was an ancient audio engineer. [KENJI]: And we have Tim Storms, producing a physical sound wave that no one in that plaza could ever hear. A voice exploring a reality beyond our evolved senses. [CAROLINE]: Between those two extremes—the perfectly amplified and the perfectly inaudible—lies the story of voice. It’s an evolutionary quirk that started with a fish’s need to breathe. It’s a neurological marvel that builds our social world. And now, it's a digital ghost we are teaching to speak with our own inflections. [CAROLINE]: It is the most primal, personal, and powerful instrument we will ever own. And its greatest performances are, without a doubt, still to come. [CAROLINE]: Dr. Kenji Tanaka, thank you so much for lending us your expertise today. [KENJI]: It was my pleasure. A real tonal delight. [CAROLINE]: And Mom, thanks for calling in. I’ll call you later to talk about those deductions. [MARTHA]: You do that. And send this nice doctor a thank-you note. The handwritten kind. [CAROLINE]: [Laughs] I will. The Grand Unified Theory of X is written and produced by me, Dr. Caroline Wallis. [OUTRO MUSIC: Theme swells, feeling both conclusive and full of lingering curiosity] [END OF EPISODE]
The human voice is a marvel of evolution, from ancient fish to modern AI. This episode explores its incredible journey, uncovering how our brains orchestrate speech, how it can be repurposed for echolocation, and the psychological impact of synthetic voices. Dive into the deep history and surprising future of the sound that defines us.
Key Topics Covered:
- The etymology and linguistic history of the word "voice"
- The evolutionary journey of human vocal anatomy, from fish gills to speech
- How the brain produces and perceives voice, including emotional prosody
- Phonagnosia: the inability to recognize familiar voices
- Human echolocation: using sound to "see" the world
- The concept of timbre and an instrument's unique "voice"
- The rise of AI voice generation and the "uncanny valley" phenomenon
Referenced Studies and Researchers:
- John Colapinto (Evolutionary Biologist)
- Takeshi Nishimura et al. (2022, Science) - on vocal anatomy evolution
- Ethofer et al. (2006, 2012) - on emotional prosody and amygdala activation
- Schirmer and Gunter (2017) - on emotional voice processing
- Belin, Fecteau, & Bédard (2004) - on neural correlates of voice perception
- Lore Thaler et al. (2011, 2013) - on human echolocation and visual cortex activation
- Masahiro Mori (1970) - coined the term "uncanny valley"
- Pantev et al. (1998) - on auditory cortex processing of timbre
Books/Articles Mentioned:
- Science (2022 study on vocal anatomy)
- PLOS Biology (2022 research on auditory cortex voice processing)
- IEEE Robotics & Automation Magazine (Masahiro Mori's 1970 paper)
Credits:
- Host: Dr. Caroline Wallis
- Featuring: Dr. Kenji Tanaka (Professor of Auditory Neuroscience and Psychoacoustics, Stanford) and Martha Wallis
- Episode: ##