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The human voice is a rich source of information and an important means of interpersonal communication. Beginning with Darwin (1872), vocal communication has long interested evolutionary scientists, and in the last quarter century empirical research on voice production and perception from an evolutionary perspective has increased dramatically. One reason for this surge of interest is that behavioral ecologists and evolutionary psychologists have taken advantage of recent technological improvements in acoustic analysis software as well as sound recording and reproduction devices. More importantly, many voice researchers have recognized that the extraction of biologically relevant information from the vocal channel constitutes a set of adaptive problems widely shared across many species. Evolutionary scientists studying human vocal behavior therefore have a rich theoretical framework and an established comparative basis for developing specific research questions.

For any vocal species, we should expect perceptual adaptations designed to process acoustic features of the vocal sounds of conspecifics (eg, other individuals of the same species). Humans are no exception—there is strong evidence that dedicated areas of the human brain, including the middle superior temporal sulcus (STS), are specialized for human voice perception (Belin et al. 2000; Pernet et al. 2015). The human STS is analogous to the vocal perception brain areas in several other species, such as macaques (Petkov et al. 2008). Much like how we learn to process faces and develop face-specific regions in our brains (Kanwisher, McDermott, and Chun 1997), voice …