The Oxford Handbook of Voice Perception

Speech perception has been the focus of innumerable studies over the past decades. While our abilities to recognize individuals by their voice state plays a central role in our everyday social interactions, limited scientific attention has been devoted to the perceptual and cerebral mechanisms underlying nonverbal information processing in voices.

The Oxford Handbook of Voice Perception takes a comprehensive look at this emerging field and presents a selection of current research in voice perception. The forty chapters summarise the most exciting research from across several disciplines covering acoustical, clinical, evolutionary, cognitive, and computational perspectives.

In particular, this handbook offers an invaluable window into the development and evolution of the 'vocal brain', and considers in detail the voice processing abilities of non-human animals or human infants. By providing a full and unique perspective on the recent developments in this burgeoning area of study, this text is an important and interdisciplinary resource for students, researchers, and scientific journalists interested in voice perception.

Sascha Frühholz is currently SNSF Professor for Cognitive and Affective Neuroscience at the Institute of Psychology at University of Zurich, Switzerland. He is also with the Neuroscience Center Zurich, Switzerland and the Zurich Center for Integrative Human Physiology, Switzerland. He has established a unique line of research into dynamic brain patterns during the production and perception of socio-affective information in voices.

Pascal Belin obtained his first position as Assistant professor at Universite de Montreal, Canada in 2001 and tenure as full professor at Glasgow University, UK in 2005. In 2012 established a research group at the La Timone Neuroscience Institute at Aix-Marseille University, France. Pascal Belin has pioneered a line of research on the cerebral bases of voice perception that has generated more than 100 publications and over 10,000 citations.

Part I: The Voice is Special
1. The science of voice perception, Sascha Fruhholz and Pascal Belin
2. Ancient of days: The vocal pattern as primordial big bang of communication, Diana Van and Lancker Sidtis
3. The "Vocal Brain": Core and extended cerebral networks for voice processing, Pascal Belin
4. Acoustic patterning of emotion vocalizations, Klaus Scherer
5. Acoustic properties of infant-directed speech, Yuanyuan Wang, Derek M. Houston, and Amanda Seidl
6. The singing voice, Johan Sundberg
7. Suprasegmental speech prosody and the human brain: The acoustic and vocal features and the evolutionary architecture of the brain, Martin Meyer, Matthias Keller, and Nathalie Giroud
Part II: Ontogenetic development of voice perception
8. Voice perception in newborns and infants, Natacha Paquette, Emmanuelle Dionne-Dostie, Maryse Lassonde and Anne Gallagher
9. One step beyond: musical expertise and word learning, Stefan Elmer, Eva Dittinger, and Mireille Besson
10. Social perception in infancy: An integrative perspective on the development of voice and face perception, Evelyne Mercure and Laura Kischkel
11. Neural responses to infant vocalisations in adult listeners, Katherine S. Young, Christine E. Parsons, Alan Stein, Peter Vuust, Michelle G. Craske, and Morten L. Kringelbach
Part III: Evolution and comparative perspective
12. Comparative perspectives on communication in human and nonhuman primates: Grounding meaning in broadly conserved processes of voice production, perception, affect and cognition, Alan K.S. Nielsen and Drew Rendall
13. Linking vocal learning to social reward in the brain: Proposed neural mechanisms of socially guided song learning, Samantha Carouso Peck and Michael H. Goldstein
14. Voice sensitive regions, neurons and multisensory pathways in the primate brain, Catherine Perrodin and Christopher I. Petkov
15. Voice perception across species, Attila Andics and Tamas Farago
16. Emotional and social communication in nonhuman animals, Charles T. Snowdon
17. Dual stream models of auditory vocal communication, Josef P. Rauschecker
Part IV: Emotional and motivational vocal expression
18. The neural network underlying the processing of affective vocalizations, Sascha Fruhholz and Leonardo Ceravolo
19. The electrophysiology and time-course of processing vocal emotion expressions, Silke Paulmann and Sonja A. Kotz
20. Amygdala processing of vocal emotions, Jocelyne C. Whitehead and Jorge L. Armony
21. Laughing out loud! Investigations on different types of laughter, Kai Alter and Dirk Wildgruber
Part V: Vocal identity, personality, and the social context
22. Recognizing speakers across languages, Tyler K. Perrachione
23. Perceiving speaker identity from the voice, Stefan R. Schweinberger and Romi Zaske
24. Perceptual correlates and cerebral representation of voices-identity, gender, and age, Marianne Latinus and Romi Zaske
25. The perception of personality traits from voices, Phil McAleer and Pascal Belin
26. Vocal attractiveness, Katarzyna Pisanski and David R. Feinberg
27. Voice processing: Implications for earwitness testimony, Sarah Stevenage
28. Voices in the context of human faces and bodies, Benjamin Kreifelts and Thomas Ethofer
29. Linguistic 'first impressions': Accents as cue to person perception, Patricia E.G. Bestelmeyer
Part VI: Machine-based generation and decoding of voices
30. Voice morphing, Kawahara Skuk
31. Machine-based decoding of voices and human speech, Alessandro Vinciarelli
32. Machine-based decoding of paralinguistic vocal features, Maximilian Schmitt and Bjorn Schuller
33. Neurocomputational models of voice and speech perception, Bernd J. Kroger
34. Voice and speech synthesis - highlighting control of prosody, Keikichi Hirose
35. Voice biometrics for forensic speaker recognition applications, Volker Dellwo, Peter French, and Lei He
Part VII: Clinical disorders
36. Impairments in decoding vocal emotion in schizophrenia and bipolar disorder, David I. Leitman and Sarah M. Haigh
37. Perception of voices that do not exist: Neuronal mechanisms in clinical and non-clinical hallucinations, Kristiina Kompus and Kenneth Hugdahl
38. Deficits in voice-identity processing: Acquired and developmental phonagnosia, Claudia Roswandowitz, Corrina Maguinnessa, and Katharina von Kriegstein
39. Voice processing in dementia, Jennifer L. Agustus, Julia C. Hailstone, and Jason D. Warren
40. Reconsidering the nature of voice, Jody Kreiman and Bruce Gerratt