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Rita Singh
Profiling Humans
from their Voice
Profiling Humans from their Voice
Rita Singh
123
Rita Singh
Carnegie Mellon University
Pittsburgh, PA, USA
This Springer imprint is published by the registered company Springer Nature Singapore Pte Ltd.
The registered company address is: 152 Beach Road, #21-01/04 Gateway East, Singapore 189721,
Singapore
“I HAVE SHOWN THAT VOICE QUALITY
DEPENDS ABSOLUTELY UPON BONE
STRUCTURE, THAT BONE STRUCTURE IS
INHERITED, AND THAT THEREFORE VOCAL
QUALITY IS INHERITED.”
—Walter B. Swift, 1916
What is Different
Computational profiling as described in this book differs from prior efforts in one
key respect. The fact that voice is correlated to many human parameters has been
known to scientists, doctors, philosophers, priests, performers, soothsayers—in fact,
to people of myriad vocations for centuries. Many of these correlations have been
scientifically investigated, and demonstrated or proven in many ways. The key
difference between that earlier science, and what this book represents is simply this:
while earlier methods were focused on demonstration and proof of existence (of
such relationships), and used observable relations to attempt to predict human
parameters from voice, the current science does not require such observables. It is
built instead on the hypothesis that if any factor whatsoever influences the human
mind or body, and if that influence can be linked to the human voice production
mechanism through any pathway whatsoever, then there must exist an effect on
voice. The current science of profiling is then all about discovering those effects. If
we hypothesize the existence of some influence, whose effects we cannot model or
observe through standard mechanisms known to us, then we must devise artificially
intelligent mechanisms that can model or observe those. This basically represents a
handover of the capability of discovery to intelligent systems designed by us.
This book traverses pathways hewn through information in multiple disciplines,
and represents one journey undertaken in search of solutions to such mysteries
of the human voice.
The ability to shape sound is an amazing gift that most intelligent creatures have.
Some do this in response to stimuli, others do this to convey meaning as well. With
the evolution of intellectual abilities, it was only natural for this ability to evolve to
vii
viii Preface
convey more complex thoughts and deeper meaning. It was also natural, through
the process of natural selection, for those kinds of information-embedding mech-
anisms that were more supportive of survival to remain, propagate, and be refined.
Sound is no exception. Deliberately or inadvertently, partly for evolutionary rea-
sons and partly due to our specific biological construction, information about each
person is embedded in their voice.
At this point in time, we don’t have a good idea of just how much information is
embedded in the human voice. Reasoning about speech as a biomechanical, social,
and cognitive process leads us to believe that there is a tremendous amount of
information in it—more than we are capable of assimilating through our limited
capabilities of auditory observation and perception.
This book captures some of my thoughts, ideas, and research on discovering or
even guessing the range and extent of information embedded in the human voice,
on deriving it quantitatively from voice signals, and using it to infer bio-relevant
facts about the speaker and their environment. In my experience, this endeavor is so
rife with challenges, and human voice is of such tremendous importance, that it
deserves to be assigned the status of a subfield of acoustic intelligence in its own
right—so I call it Profiling Humans from their Voice, which is also the title of this
book.
The book has two parts. Part I takes a sweeping look at the landscape of
scientific explorations into the human voice, which has been the subject of an
astounding volume of research and observation, literally over centuries. Voice, its
acoustics, its content, the effect of various factors on these, and conversely its effect
on them, and on other humans, its perceptions, and its manipulations are all dis-
cussed in this part. This part also dives into the voice signal from a signal pro-
cessing perspective. It (very) briefly elucidates the concepts that might be relevant
or foundational to profiling, attempting to link some subjective observations of the
quality of voice, based on which most human judgments are made, to explainable or
quantifiable signal characteristics.
Part II deals with computational profiling: the computationalization of human
judgment (and beyond). Predicated largely on concepts in machine learning and
artificial intelligence, this part discusses mechanisms for information discovery,
feature engineering, and the deduction of profile parameters from them. It discusses
the subject of reconstructing the human persona from voice, and its reverse—the
reconstruction of voice from information about the human persona. It ends with a
discussion of the applications and future outlook for the science of profiling, and
also ethical issues associated with its use. Issues of reliability, confidence estima-
tion, statistical verification, etc., that are extremely important in practical applica-
tions, are all discussed.
There are multiple chapters under each part, divided up to make the overall
theme of the part easier to navigate. Each part is provided with a summary of the
chapters it includes.
Although meant to be a technical exposition, in my mind this book is a canvas
with dabs of paint from many fields. Together they form a complete picture—but it
is still an underdrawing. There is just so much that one can write in a book of
Preface ix
normal dimensions. As I type the last full stop in this book, it feels incomplete in
many respects. I hope the studies referenced in this book can fill in the missing
details to some extent.
More than anything, I hope this book is both enjoyable and informative to all
readers.
I thank the United States Coast Guard for initiating this research in early December
2014, and for their strong and unfaltering support of it since then. They continue to
drive it forward through constructive feedback from actual field tests of this
technology.
Numerous colleagues across the world have given their opinion, enhanced my
knowledge, and helped me refine my thoughts and perspective. Of those, some who
have had an especially transformative influence on this work are Bhiksha Raj from
Carnegie Mellon University, and Joseph Keshet from Bar-Ilan University. John
McDonough was a source of inspiration to me as a scientist—and continues to be,
though he is no more with us. I thank all from the bottom of my heart.
I thank my family, especially my mother Susheela Singh, my aunt Namita Singh
who passed away since I began writing this book, my sister Sapna a.k.a Jugnu
Singh, and our niece Neha Singh for accomplishing the impossible task of creating
Time. This book was written through times of great turmoil. It was written in
negative time—in the time I didn’t have. For this book to exist, time had to be
manufactured somehow. They solved the problem by making every distraction in
my life vanish for the duration they were in my physical vicinity. It came at the cost
of their time. My friend Satya Venneti did so as well by vanishing for brief periods
and magically reappearing with things that represented significant time savings for
me. I thank Alka Patel, my bravest and ever-smiling friend, for her friendship and
support through all this.
I have been fortunate enough to have spent my entire career working alongside
intellectuals and scholars, who are giants in their own fields. If those, I would like to
especially thank Richard Stern for his invaluable lessons in signal processing and
psychoacoustics, and James Karl Baker for sharing his phenomenal insights into the
subjects of automatic speech recognition, human language, speech and voice in
general. Their scientific perspective, and that of all my colleagues around the world
who I interact with has helped shape my thinking and thereby this book.
xi
xii Acknowledgements
Two important milestones were crossed while this book was being written. The
first was crossed when we demonstrated voice profiling technology as described in
this book for the first time, at the World Economic Forum in Tianjin, China, in
September 2018. It was tested by nearly a thousand people within a span of 3 days.
The systems demonstrated made multiple profile deductions from voice, and also
recreated the speaker’s face in virtual reality. The second milestone was crossed in
February 2019, when we used the reverse of this technology to recreate the voice of
one of the world’s greatest painters—Rembrandt van Rijn (1606–1669)—from his
self-portraits and other information. This was done in collaboration with
Rijksmuseum of Holland (and their art experts and historians), J. Walter Thompson
Inc. in Amsterdam, and Linguists from Leiden University in Holland with the
sponsorship of ING Bank in Europe. My students Mahmoud Al Ismail, Richard
Tucker, Yandong Wen, Wayne Zhao, Yolanda Gao, Daanish Ali Khan, Shahan Ali
Memon, Hira Yasin, Alex Litzenberger, and Jerry Ding were instrumental in the
creation of both landmarks. In addition to the students who directly contributed to
these, I thank Abelino Jiminez, Anurag Kumar (a.k.a Anurag Last Name
Unknown), Ahmad Shah, Rajat Kulshreshtha, Prakhar Naval, Raymond Xia and
Tyler Vuong for their incredible creativity and continuing contributions to this
work. I wouldn’t have been able to take this research forward without the contri-
bution of all of these students.
Contents
xiii
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