Please join us for our next Brown Bag speaker event of the semester on Thursday, November 20, 1:30-2:30pm, LRW 4001. Dr. Pauline Larrouy-Maestri will present a paper titled “Vocal communication beyond the words.” Dr. Larrouy-Maestri is a senior researcher at the Max Planck Institute for Empirical Aesthetics in Frankfurt, Germany. With a background in pedagogy, psychology, music performance (piano), and speech-language pathology, she completed a PhD in cognitive sciences. Pauline and her team employ complementary approaches to investigate how we categorize acoustic information and make sense of sounds, with a particular focus on vocalizations.
Dr. Larrouy-Maestri provided the following summary:
The voice, whether human- or AI-generated, conveys multiple layers of information, broadcasting emotions and intentions far beyond the literal meaning of the words. Decades of research have identified key acoustic features that carry this information, yet a deterministic mapping between these acoustic cues and specific meanings remains elusive. In this talk, I will present our recent work tackling this puzzle. I will specifically discuss the role of pitch in inferring communicative intent, and explore how individual differences among listeners can lead to misunderstandings in everyday communication.
