# Speaker perception **Opening (not a real abstract):** Stefan R. Schweinberger,1,2∗ Hideki Kawahara,3 Adrian P. Simpson,2,4 Verena G. Skuk1,2 and Romi Zäske1,2 While humans use their voice mainly for communicating information about the world, paralinguistic cues in the voice signal convey rich dynamic information about a speaker´s arousal and emotional state, and extralinguistic cues reflect more stable speaker characteristics including identity, biological sex and social gender, socioeconomic or regional background, and age. Here we review the anatomical and physiological bases for individual differences in the human voice, before discussing how recent methodological progress in voice morphing and voice synthesis has promoted research on current theoretical issues, such as how voices are mentally represented in the human brain. Special attention is **Authors:** [[Schweinberger]]