Hacker News Reader

Comment by inetknght | Hacker News Reader

> biometrics aren't passwords. You can't rotate your voice.

"My voice is my passport. Verify me."

I have to renew my passport every 10 years or so. How do I do that with my voice? I guess it's time to take some vocal lessons.

View on HN

Reminds me of the Interrail data breach [https://stateofsurveillance.org/news/eurail-data-breach-3080...]

The fediverse take on that was "customers are advised to rotate their faces and birthdays."

Vocal lessons are both a lot of fun and a lot of work. I haven't been using any voiceprint systems but I know most humans are unable to tell that my trained voice is the same physical person as my old voice. Would be curious to find out if an AI voiceprint system can discern whether it's the same or not.

You’ll really like this then, it’s a clip of Phil Hendrie who I recently discovered. He does tons of voices and sound effects, his studio has multiple microphone and switches between them for different speakers.

Here is a clip of him when someone called his studio thinking they were the local Pizza Hut. Phil does all the other voices, including the phone system.

https://share.google/QHNkgsOdvGj7tapfk

Are you talking about singing lessons, or actual talking training? Singing lessons helped me sing but didn't change the way i talked at all, but i was only able to afford them for a summer so maybe it takes more time than that

When I was in NYC a while back, I met a woman at a friend's dinner party. She sounded totally American, but was in fact Brazilian. She worked as a lawyer, and said that she'd had to get extensive voice training in order to sound American so that people would take her more seriously professionally. I have no idea if the professional part worked, but the accent, mannerisms etc was amazing - I would never have guessed.

I'm referring to speaking, not singing. After a _lot_ of work, I can speak passably as a woman or man and switch freely between the two. Depending on context I generally choose just one for the entire conversation, as switching tends to cause whiplash in the listener (^_^).

I'm curious as to what prompted you to pursue this ability.

I'm trans.

The ability to switch mid-sentence is mostly just something I discovered I can do and is fun. But the ability to pass as my real gender is something that helps me feel safe. And when needed, being able to occasionally pass as my prior gender (e.g., when calling my bank until I can change my name/gender legally), it also quite useful.

There is a common enough need for this for some

Does the f0 change? Or is it like power distribution of harmonics change? Or is it something else?

More or less everything changes. For trans men who are on HRT the voice's lowest pitch will get lower, as it would for someone AMAB going through puberty (since a second puberty is literally what's happening on HRT). Trans women do not get any voice changes from HRT though, so they train to raise their larynx when speaking to get up into the "perceived female range."

But pitch is far from the only thing that someone gendered one way or another in western culture (and presumably elsewhere). Resonance, weight, breathing patterns, word choice, and prosody all matter too. That's way too much to go into in a post here on HN, but the easiest one to understand is resonance or "size." Female-perceived speakers have higher resonance / smaller size. This means that some of the higher harmonics are amplified more than the lower harmonics, an it's called a "small size" because the actual resonating area from the larynx to the tongue is made smaller (mostly through tongue placement). Male-perceived speakers do the opposite, creating a larger space for resonance and resulting in a lowered resonance.

I know quite a few cis people who are also going through some of this training to help with their voice acting, or even just for fun.

There are a lot of good (and unfortunately some bad) resources online for trans voice training in both directions. My personal favorite (and where I started my lessons) is Seattle Voice Labs, but Online Vocal Coach / Vox Nova is also a great resource.

Thanks - that matches my little observations and clears up a few questions I had. I did notice that spectrogram views are almost the same regardless of perceived gender except that the strongest bands and their distributions change, and also that perceived pitch isn't as dynamic as actual frequency shifts of harmonics, but didn't realize that the center frequency moving up had to do with both physical and figurative size. It makes sense.

One thing I've been feeling itchy regarding this domain is that a lot of existing resources are shallow and there aren't many gamified options even though things like rhythm game feels like a perfect fit. I think not a negligible number of people, especially young and inexperienced, are struggling with aggressive or dis-satisfied sounding voices against their intent. Just a laptop app to feedback the error between their intended voice and recognized voices to let them minimize the error feel like a useful thing to me.

I've seen some people attempt to make a voice gender recognizer through machine learning, but nothing that has actually worked well. I'm not an ML expert, but I expect they're overfitting on just a small subset of accents and specific formants. The one I played with (can't find the link) was just trying to show weight vs resonance, and it got very confused by my voice. I am never misgendered from my voice but I (intentionally) have a slightly deeper femme voice than what it had been trained on.

IMO, the best way to learn to control your voice is to learn to hear variations in size, weight, pitch, open quotient, prosody, etc. From there you can become your own coach so you're not focused on an app while having a real world conversation with someone. Would a gamified version help? Possibly.

(sorry for the delay, I have no idea if you'll see this. I wrote it last week but apparently never pressed the submit button??)

I always answer my likely spam calls in a weird high pitched fake voice just in case.

>> "My voice is my passport. Verify me."

Well met, fellow Uplinker!!

>Well met, fellow Uplinker!!

I'm pretty sure this person worked at Playtronics.

just take up smoking heavily

Easier to inhale an undisclosed amount of helium before recording your password voice

I recommend sulfur hexafluoride for something harder to replicate. Nothing like making hackers risk their life to impersonate you

Or skip the half measures and go straight for the dioxygen diflouride.

https://www.science.org/content/blog-post/things-i-won-t-wor...

Excellent idea!

Do you need to calibrate it to be able to repeat it, and does that calibration change if you are at a different altitude and in different conditions, such as humidity?

Does merely changing altitude (or ambient pressure) change voice enough to be considered different by a recognition or synthesizing system?

Despite popular belief, even heavy smoking does not alter your voice in a significant way.

Do you have a source for that? I can tell with pretty good accuracy whether my students smoke from their voices (adult language learners, we take smoke breaks together and they have no reason to conceal it), and would be very surprised if I’m just that lucky and there’s nothing a person can pick up on acoustically.

20 years of heavy smoking :)

Although it does seem to affect some people more than others for sure, I guess it depends how and what you're smoking.

Despite popular belief, even heavy smoking does not alter your voice in a significant way.

I guess you don't listen to Sinatra.

Or John Mellencamp, who repeatedly states in interviews that he likes what smoking does to his singing voice.

Source: it came to me in a dream.

There's this myth (that came to you in pop culture) that you end up sounding like Tom Waits.

In reality, some phlegm aside, their voice is still the same in any way that matters.

If you knew people who didn't smoke and started (not uncommon in the 80s and 90s, quite a few people I know started smoking in university, or after the stress of a first job, some even later), and also the inverse, you can trivially hear it for yourself.

My voice is exactly the same as before I started smoking heavily, and I have never had any of the associated problems that most people seem to have (lung capacity, stamina, infections, phlegm etc) - pot luck I guess, like most things

Depends on what you're smoking

bacon!

and mostly how.

Smoke 40 cigarettes a day, your voice will be unrecognisable in no time

Also: it’s not just the first order smoking, respiratory issues, increased chance of illness, and chronic coughing can damage your voices presentation.

Biometrics are "what you are", not "what you know" or "what you have".

Voice fingeprinting is essentially useless because it is easily recorded and reproduced.

I have been telling people for years that biometrics (face, fingerprint, voice) is your username, not your password. But people are easily swayed by convenience.

If your user name is tattooed on your forehead, yes.

For all intents an purposes it is, especially face ID. Also, courts in most countries can compel you to provide biometrics. But many cannot compel you to reveal passwords.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com