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The memorability of voices is predictable and consistent across listeners

Nature Human Behaviour volume 9, pages 758–768 (2025)Cite this article

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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.

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Fig. 1: Continuous recognition memory task.
Fig. 2: Consistency of voice clip memorability scores.
Fig. 3: Correlation of memorability scores across experiments.
Fig. 4: Correlation matrix of Sentence 1 voice features.

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Data availability

All data analysed in this study are available via the Open Science Framework at https://osf.io/pybwd/ (ref. 63). The DARPA TIMIT Acoustic-Phonetic Continuous Speech Corpus used in this study is available for download at https://academictorrents.com/details/34e2b78745138186976cbc27939b1b34d18bd5b3.

Code availability

All experiment code is available via the Open Science Framework at https://osf.io/pybwd/ (ref. 63).

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Acknowledgements

This research was supported by the National Science Foundation under Grant No. 2329776 awarded to W.A.B., the NSF Graduate Research Fellowship (Grant No. 1746045) awarded to C.R., and the University of Chicago Quad Undergraduate Research Scholarship awarded to E.G. The funders had no role in study design, data collection and analysis, decision to publish or preparation of the manuscript. We thank K. Van Engen, H. Nusbaum and M. Berman for their insightful feedback on the analyses and the work as a whole.

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  1. Department of Psychology, University of Chicago, Chicago, IL, USA

    Cambria Revsine, Esther Goldberg & Wilma A. Bainbridge

  2. Neuroscience Institute, University of Chicago, Chicago, IL, USA

    Wilma A. Bainbridge

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  1. Cambria Revsine
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  2. Esther Goldberg
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  3. Wilma A. Bainbridge
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C.R. collected the data, analysed the datasets and drafted the manuscript. W.A.B. designed the research, supervised analyses and edited the manuscript. E.G. assisted in data collection and analysed the Experiment 3 data.

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Correspondence to Cambria Revsine.

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Revsine, C., Goldberg, E. & Bainbridge, W.A. The memorability of voices is predictable and consistent across listeners. Nat Hum Behav 9, 758–768 (2025). https://doi.org/10.1038/s41562-025-02112-w

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