Greet me and I'll tell you who you are

Can the intonation of somebody's voice tell about their social traits? At IRCAM, researchers conducted experiments to understand how the brain was able to analyse the speech prosody of a speaker, thus demonstrating whether someone is trustworthy or has a domineering attitude towards the person they are talking to. They developed an experimental protocol to understand with which representations in mind one person makes an opinion about the personality of another. Using a phase vocoder, the researchers managed to randomly generate no less than 70,000 variations in the intonation of the word "bonjour", which, when presented to a sample of people, led to the conclusion that the social code is the same for everyone. This method could have large-scale applications, particularly in the medical field, to understand certain prosody disorders and help in the exploration of human language.