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arXiv AI By Yiquan Zhou, Yixuan Wang, Xiaozhe Qi, Xin Gao, Shihao Li

Where Does Timbre Hide? Localizing Speaker Information in Speech Signals

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The paper investigates where speaker timbre information is located within speech signals, examining frequency bands, phase/magnitude structure, source/filter decomposition, voiced/unvoiced regions, SSL layers, and codec tokens across Mandarin, English, and Japanese data. It finds that 1–8 kHz magnitude and vocal‑tract spectral‑envelope features dominate perception, while above‑8 kHz bands remain machine‑discriminative; shallow SSL layers reveal compact speaker cues, and token leakage varies with tokenizer and layer choice. These insights guide where generative speech systems should condition on or transform speaker information and where to audit residual leakage.

Machine-generated by The Flow from the publisher's headline and feed description — not written or checked by a human. The full article lives at arXiv AI.

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