Voices are certainly special to the auditory system.
It's really quite magical. This Thursday, Ben Gold will be describing early work on voice coding and synthesis. Ben Gold is the author of two well-respected books on signal processing and did some of the original work in the '60s to use computers to analyze and code speech. This week he'll be talking about this early work. Next week, Sid Feels will be discussing his work to build a hand-controlled synthesizer.