The memorability of voices is predictable and consistent across listeners

Abstract

Memorability, the likelihood that a stimulus is remembered, is an intrinsic stimulus property that is highly consistent across people—participants tend to remember or forget the same faces, objects and more. However, these consistencies in memory have thus far only been observed for visual stimuli. Here we investigated memorability in the auditory domain, collecting recognition memory scores from over 3,000 participants listening to a sequence of speakers saying the same sentence. We found significant consistency across participants in their memory for voice clips and for speakers across different utterances. Regression models incorporating both low-level (for example, fundamental frequency) and high-level (for example, dialect) voice properties were significantly predictive of memorability and generalized out of sample, supporting an inherent memorability of speakers’ voices. These results provide strong evidence that listeners are similar in the voices they remember, which can be reliably predicted by quantifiable low-level acoustic features. In a large-scale online study, Revsine et al. observed that participants tend to remember (or forget) the same speakers’ voices, regardless of what they were saying. They show that how memorable a voice is can be predicted from a set of acoustic features.