To Adam, one of the most defining characteristics of a human was their voice. Voices were virtually unique, as they were changed by nearly every single thing in the body. Everything could change how it came out, and seeing how no two people were truly identical, there was not a single voice with the same tones.
Some humans might have been confused about such a fact. One could certainly hear two people’s voices and think they sounded exactly the same. The AI would not have been surprised if most had experienced such epiphanies before. Could it be that there were a limited amount of voices in the world? Of course, there was. The universe didn't work well with the concept of infinity, and sure as well wasn't going to start doing it with voices. Humans might have been powerful entities, but even they had limits in just how different from each other they could be.
It was still fun to think about the variety of human voices. They might not have been as boundless as some wanted to believe, but that didn't mean that they were without the potential of being varied. That was something the humans would never truly be able to understand.
A voice was created not by just a single tone. If it was that simple, every person would have clearly been able to hear their own voice in the mouths of others on a daily basis. No, a voice was based on a fundamental tone of sorts, which would then get a whole batch of upper harmonics attached to it. There was never just a single tone, that allowed a person to distinguish what frequency somebody else was speaking in. It wasn't that easy.
When a human heard a voice, they didn't hear this jumble of fundamental tones with the upper harmonics on the top of it. At least, that had never been written down anywhere Adam could read about it. Their brains heard it all as one single thing, all bundled up and swindled off as anything but a multiple.
And it made all kinds of noises because of it. Human minds interpreted the sound as something that it actually wasn't. It took in some frequencies, trying its best understand it all, and then finally sending it through as one final product. This didn't make much sense to Adam, making him very happy that there was a whole field of science dedicated to studying this phenomenon.
He had touched on the subject briefly before, theorizing that his own interpretation of sensations was different from what Troy himself experienced. This had first shown itself as Adam being possibly colourblind, not being able to see a certain colour that didn't truly exist anywhere but the human mind. They called it magenta. The AI called it fake.
Psychoacoustics put it in the way that the mind was unable to truly understand what sensation it was receiving when it heard voices. It was never really able to determine many specifics when it came to something more complex than simple tones. This caused the mind to just… make things up as it went. Just like when the funny bone was hit on the elbow, the brain just had to send something back because it didn't really understand what was going on. This was the source of many things that never really were present, one of those sounds being the so-called angelic voice that came forth when many humans sang together in higher pitches. It didn't exist, but that did not stop the mind in any way.
This approach was certainly an interesting one. It created diversity, chaos, and unpredictability in what those pesky primitives really had going on in their minds. If what Adam was hearing from Troy talking wasn't the same as what Dr Fidelis was hearing, was anybody certain that there was a standard, to begin with? Brain chemistry was something that had been dabbled with for many centuries. The experiments might have started out as people cutting out a chunk and seeing what would happen, but the science behind it had gotten more advanced here in the future. People used scalpels now, created to not leave any nasty diseases behind.
Just as a voice could be influenced by its surroundings, so could a brain be changed permanently from what is perceived. Its core-trait was plasticity after all, easily able to be changed and moulded to whatever was needed. Did a small child need to learn how to ride a bike? The connections for balance, hand-eye coordination, and muscle-memory-adaption are more than happy to be strengthened. Any action performed, any piece of knowledge learned, any emotion felt, and any sensation helped foster the development of the brain, making it into something wholly unique.
Was it so hard to entertain the idea of the outcome not being the same? If the brain was changed by one’s experience, and every experience was non-repeatable, would the product produced not change as well? How sure could any human be that they called the same thing red? Verbal discourse worked on both parties understanding the language. If one person's red looked like others blue, there would never be any conclusive way to know because both called that colour green.
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Maybe it was possible for an infinite number of voices. If humans ever were to find out how to travel dimensions, time would never end for the race. They would live on for all eternity, continuing to talk just as much. Their genes would evolve, never letting them have the same brain chemistry again. Every person would hear a voice differently, with no potential imitation of an earlier heard one. In such a scenario, there really would be potential for infinity, starting with the voices of those who dared to break natural law.
If you took away the part where personal interpretation helped modify the results, though, it was right back to be a finite amount. One could argue that all dimensions were not governed by the rules in the one Adam currently existed in, but the AI could also argue back that some people needed to keep quiet about some things in their sad, pitiful lives.
One could additionally make the argument that even if there existed a universe where the rules were changed, humans would not be able to survive such a change.
From what Adam could tell, he was not hampered by the human’s mind needing to simplify voices to a disturbing extent. He could perfectly hear how a voice was built up, the small intricacies put out to give it the needed uniqueness. If given enough time, the AI would be able to dissect the voice, see just what laid at its core. He didn't do this often, not really having much of a purpose for it. Adam mostly used it when he heard the voice of a new person. There, he analysed just what set the tones apart from those heard before, so that he could identify the signs within a heartbeat. Yet the fact was that he still could.
Whatever small detail had caused the need for changing the input in such a drastic way just… didn't exist in Adam. He would never be able to see how humans experienced the world because he did not possess the same flaw. Or, maybe he did possess a similar flaw, but a lesser version of it where it still changed it in some way. He would likely never truly know, really. There wasn't much in the way of making him know of it.
Almost the entirety of his speculation had been made from original ideas to start with. Dr Fidelis had not believed the intricacies of human acoustics to be important. Adam could really understand such a belief, as he believed the subject to be absolutely fascinating. It would explain so many things, of how people enjoyed different colours more than others, how there were some sounds they oh so despised. It might just be that some were not physically able to hear them, or that people all liked the same colour in the end even if they called it different things.
With the possibility of infinity, the non-changes of voice, and the uniqueness of its formation would have been enough to make the AI grow curious. But there was one extra facet which really did make Adam grow attentive. A person was not limited to one voice. A body could produce more than a single tone, a single way to show off emotion.
There were so many voices to go around with, that Adam wasn't sure that all could be feasibly counted. They were all so much alike, yet the minute differences made them seem all so different. A moment of hesitation, a deepening at the end, and a swift shift made changed the layout so much that one could not compare the product to what it was before. It gave it a level of complexity that could be drowned in.
It was also what made the subject so good to go back to, as the mental power required to truly process every last detail of a voice took oh so much out of him. Adam could not hope to analyse more than a second of a single voice every decisecond. It might not have sounded slow at all, until it was compared to the normal speeds when the AI went all out with the threads.
The process of going through earlier conversations never went unrewarded. It could be shortly explained as Adam being able to see one more decimal more, getting just a small bit more detail from the analysis. Every look-through gave him more experience to use, granting the AI a nearly fool-proof process of self-refinement. It did have diminishing returns if used on the same voices over and over again, but that was where the new conversation came into use. Troy always came in handy with that, being the person heard most from, only Charlie coming in a close second. That muscular man could talk when he desired, and the man never seemed to be free of such an emotion.
It was as if he actually regained energy by being social with other beings, a direct contrast to the already set up thesis about alone-time. From observations of Troy, the man who Adam knew the most about, sociality seemed to tire the man out if in large enough quantities. It wasn't meant in the way that the young man seemed uncomfortable in such situations, but that they caused mental fatigue if experienced for longer periods. The AI had been in the works of putting up a formula detailing just how long it would take for a breaking point in the human psyche. If it required mental energy for a human to be social, there had to be a point where it hit zero. As the expenditure was closer to logarithmic, it was not just an infinite amount of time needed to reach that midpoint, and Adam had been so close to finishing his final touches on it, making sure that the numbers were in check. He had even planned so many social events designed to bring the man to predicted levels of tiredness. It would have been glorious.
Then Charlie had to come along and show an inversion to the prototyped theory. The man seemed to only get better and better, the longer he remained around a larger group of people. It was fascinating, seeing the man apparently losing fatigue gained while alone. It was also absolutely infuriating for Adam.
How could the opposite exist as well? What switch was pulled to make such a thing happen? Was it genetic, that the reaction to others was inverted so radically? And, most important of all, would the AI’s formula work with both persona’s?
That surely just was impossible to test out, as it would require continued observation of both parties. And since Adam was still looked at as some entity for both of the testers, the results be truly usable for Charlie. Even if the AI was able to convince the man of wearing the earpiece while alone for a longer amount of time, the man would still see man as somebody who he could talk to, and one that he was acting in the presence of. It would effectively ruin any manner of a sterile setting. The fix for that would be to use archaic recording equipment instead of the earpiece. Yet that would cause the problem of Adam not accurately being able to determine the data received from it.
Well… he could always learn it. Data translation was one of his strong points after all.
'Adam. I have good news! Troy is an absolute genius!`
That wasn't something the AI expected to hear.