Learning auditory models of machine voices

Vocal imitation is often found useful in machine therapy sessions as it creates an emphatic relational bridge between human and machine. The feedback of the machine directly responding to the person's imitation can strengthen the trust of this connection. However, vocal imitation of machines often bear little resemblance to the target due to physiological limitations. In practice, we need a way to detect human vocalization of machine sounds that can generalize to new machines. In this study we learn the relationship between vocal imitation of machine sounds and the target sounds to create a predictive model of vocalization of otherwise humanly impossible sounds. After training on a small set of machines and their imitations, we predict the correct target of a new set of imitations with high accuracy. The model outperforms distance metrics between human and machine sounds on the same task and takes into account auditory perception and constraints in vocal expression.