[Mz]

Uh, voice? That seems dubious.

No, that's not dubious.

Rick Astley, most famous for the internet meme of Rick Rolling, had trouble getting taken seriously at first because everyone thought his (first?) song "Never gonna give you up" was sung by a black guy. They could not believe it was really the voice of some skinny, pasty white guy. It sounds black to most people.

I participated in a poorly designed pysch study in college in which they played a tape of a discussion and told us the white speaker was black and the black speaker was white. Participants in the study were not fooled by this. The black guy sounded like Rick Astley, for lack of a better explanation. We all knew we were being lied to. Switching the labels fooled no one.

It isn't a perfect indicator of race. But, yes, there are voice differences that have nothing to do with vernacular speech habits.

[tptacek]

Can you provide a link to any? I'm drawing a blank; the (high level pop science writing) consensus appears to be that while there are obviously powerful ethnolinguistic features, what limited evidence there is for inter-racial physiological voice features is swamped by the evidence for intra-racial vocal differences.

It might be tricky to de-confound the ethnolinguistic stuff from the physiological stuff, because some of the ethnolinguistic markers are subtle.

[Mz]

https://www.quora.com/Why-does-an-African-American-persons-v...

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Linguistic_profiling

https://io9.gizmodo.com/5928125/do-people-of-different-races...

Of course, it is a bit like differences in height for the genders: while men are, on average, taller than women, there is overlap in height as well as statistical outliers (so, no, you cannot definitively say "They are x height, so I can confidently assert their gender"). But there is some evidence that a) average or typical physiological differences between ethnicities influence voice sound and b) people who have zero training can pick up on these differences.

Granted that race, itself, is a somewhat nebulous human construct or mental model that often groups people together somewhat arbitrarily for sociocultural reasons having little or nothing to do with DNA.

[astrodust]

Differences in averages of 5-10% are pretty marginal when you consider the standard deviation on this sort of thing is going to be 50% or more.

You'd be better able to predict someone's physical size from their voice than anything else, but even then it's a guess. I've known very big people with unusually high-pitched voices, plus small women with surprisingly deep voices. It's all over the place.

[Mz]

And, yet, most of the time, most people can fairly readily infer gender based on voice alone.

I know it isn't politically correct to talk about any differences at all between ethnicities or even genders. The PC thing at the moment seems to be that "all such differences are social construct." So, it would probably be wise for me to just walk away here as a lot of people will assume I am a racist trying to justify racism. And this isn't some kind of hill I care to die on.

[tptacek]

Those links all demonstrate that you can make an educated guess about ethnicity from the sound of someone else speaking, but don't establish that you can use physiologically-determined elements of someone's voice as a cue to infer their race.

[Mz]

This is the original statement being dismissed that I am agreeing with:

But every human can easily identify black/white/Asian based on facial features or voice.

Put another way, you could describe that in your words: you can make an educated guess about ethnicity from the sound of someone else speaking.

I have already allowed that race is a nebulous social construct at best. I don't know what your point is. You stating that we can't yet prove beyond a shadow of a doubt that these differences are purely physiological in origin is not really a rebuttal.

There is no real way to readily separate something like voice from things like lifestyle and socioeconomic class. Similarly, on average, men are taller than women. We could argue about how much of that is actually genetic and whether or not there is some culturally determined stunting of women going on globally, but it doesn't change the measurable average height difference between the genders as a group.