Our plenary speakers

Love, beginning, and responsibility​

Love is often understood as an emotion, a private attachment, or an individual experience. In this talk, I approach love instead as an existential and relational condition through which the self comes into being in relation to others and to the world. Drawing on existential and dialogical philosophy, I explore love as a mode of relation that initiates beginnings, exposes vulnerability, and places us under forms of responsibility we have not fully chosen.

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From this perspective, love - whether erotic, parental, or political in the sense of philia politikē - cannot be understood as something that happens to an already formed self. Rather, it is through love that the self is addressed, called forth, and shaped in relation to another. Philia politikē names a form of relationality grounded not in intimacy, but in respect, companionship, and mutual support: a way of being-with others that makes a shared world possible.

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Rather than asking what love is, the talk asks what love does: how it constitutes subjectivity, reshapes our experience of time, and sustains commitment under conditions of dependency and fragility. In this sense, love is not merely a source of meaning, but a practice through which selves and worlds are continuously brought into being - even in the face of loss and irreversibility.

Four lessons on human social evolution from 25 years of voice research​

Large sex differences in the human voice are likely to be products of ancestral mating competition among males. Research over the last quarter of a century supports this interpretation, but more importantly, it provides a lens through which to view human social evolution. In this talk, I will discuss research related to mating competition and the voice, highlighting contributions from my lab on vocal fundamental frequency in particular, and consider what this evidence reveals about the intensity and forms of ancestral mating competition, the role of secondary sex traits in communication among competitors and potential mates, and the nature of ancestral social networks.

Love humour

Three grand theories inevitably get referenced whenever anybody speaks or writes about humour: humour arises from feelings of superiority, or it is a release of tension, or it results from the perception of incongruity. I am interested in the possibility—seemingly raised by nobody in the two thousand years of philosophizing on humour, which says much more about philosophers than it says about anything else—that humour and laughter also can arise from love. My title is a double-entendre: we all love humour, and humour can be an expression of love. I will argue this by examining how humour arises and is represented in two controversial television programs about people with intellectual disabilities: Love on the Spectrum (2019; 2021) and Derek (2012-2014).

Gendered expectations in sexualised AI voices

More soon.

Mating minds, flexible voices

A large body of research shows that the human voice conveys information relevant to mating, with acoustic features such as voice pitch signalling attractiveness and dominance. However, far less is known about how individuals actively modulate their voices to exploit these associations. Humans possess an exceptional capacity for flexible vocal control, surpassing that of other primates, but why did this capacity evolve? In this talk, I present evidence of flexible vocal behaviour — from sounding bigger or more attractive to exaggerating pleasure vocalisations — to argue that human voice modulation evolved as a strategic social tool, shaped in part by sexual selection. This perspective reframes the human voice not merely as a passive signaller of traits, but as an active instrument for social and reproductive advantage.

Beautiful voices and powerful voices: where attractiveness ends and charisma begins​

Vocal attractiveness and vocal charisma are closely related in everyday perception, yet they represent fundamentally different social and communicative functions. While attractive voices are typically associated with pleasantness, likability, and aesthetic appeal, charismatic voices exert social influence: they are designed to mobilize attention, shape attitudes, and trigger followership. This keynote explores the shared nonverbal foundations and the crucial perceptual and functional boundaries between these two  related  concepts.

 

Drawing on recent perception research on vocal and facial attractiveness as well as large-scale studies on vocal charisma, the talk demonstrates that both constructs rely on partially overlapping acoustic cues, such as pitch level, spectral balance, breathiness, and speaking rate. At the same time, their weighting differs systematically. Attractive voices benefit from smoothness, symmetry, and acoustic “comfort,” whereas charismatic voices are characterized by dynamic prosodic modulation and rhythmical structuring, increased vocal and articulatory effort, and temporal variability.

 

Perceptual data further show that attractiveness is primarily driven by the face when visual information is available, while judgments of sympathy, personality, and social impact are dominated by the voice. Charisma, in contrast to attractiveness, remains highly voice-driven even in audiovisual contexts and shows stronger links to behavioral outcomes such as persuasion, trust, sales, and leadership attribution.

 

Understanding where attractiveness ends and charisma begins allows us to move from making voices sound pleasant to making voices socially effective — in terms of both programming machines and training human speakers.