A comparison between human perception and a speaker verificatio

A professional impersonator has been studied when training his voice to mimic two target speakers. A three-fold investigation has been conducted; a computer-based speaker verification system was used, phonetic-acoustic measurements were made and a perception test was conducted. Our idea behind using this type of system is to measure how close to the target voice a professional impersonation might be able to reach and to relate this to phonetic-acoustic analyses of the mimic speech and human perception. The significantly increased verification scores and the phonetic-acoustic analyses show that the impersonator really changes his natural voice and speech in his imitations. The results of the perception test show that there is no, or only a small, correlation between the verification system and the listeners when estimating the voice imitations and how close they are to one of the target speakers.