Identifying the age of a speaker using speech recognition

Question

I am just wondering if it's possible to gather the age group of someone speaking in a sample?

For example, could I tell whether the sample is a child, teenage, adult, etc?

Answer 1

Have a look at the acoustic scale website for some inspiration

http://www.acousticscale.org/wiki/index.php/Main_Page

You can estimate age based on a combination of vocal tract length (vtl) and pitch. Both of these attributes can be extracted from vowel sounds. Children will have short vtls and high pitch, adult males will have low pitch and long vtl, adult women will have fairly long vtls and higher pitch. Dwarfs can have short vtls and low pitch. The castrato will have long vtl and high pitch.