Matching a Voice to a Face

For a number of years I have been learning how to speak Spanish.  During the course of my journey through the endless resources available online that help you to learn another language, there's one little gem I stumbled across.  A podcast that teaches casual or slang Spanish so that you can learn how people actually speak rather than the academic rigid grammatically correct version most language learning sites teach.  For anyone that knows me you will know that I have been rather fascinated with podcasts recently and that I have listened to many.  Despite this new-found obsession, I have actually been listening to podcasts a lot longer than I realised.

One thing I like about podcasts is that you listen rather than watch or read the content.  There's a different part of your brain involved in this act.  I think this helps with retention, but that is a discussion for another post.  Instead I'd like to focus on something quirky about how we internalise the world based on our perceptions.  Most of the podcasts I listen to are created by people I have prior knowledge of and therefore know quite a bit about them, primarily what they look like.  The Spanish podcasts on the other hand were created by people who initially did it as a hobby.  They had no social media presence at all to begin with, apart from a blog that accompanied the podcast which is where I first discovered them. 

It's been several years now that I have followed this podcast and throughout that time it never occurred to me to seek out the creators to see what they looked like.  Recently whilst using a site called Duolingo I found myself watching Duolingo's own Spanish podcast and whilst looking at videos on youtube I stumbled across one by the creators I had been listening to for years.  The first thing I noticed when they spoke was how they looked and the realisation in my head of "oh that's what you look like" and then "You don't look anything like how I imagined you" - that last point was what has been dwelling on my mind.

There is no relation of appearance to the sound of your voice.  There's no way to tell from a photograph of someone, what they would actually sound like.  Despite this, we still create voices for people we have never heard speak and we still create images in our minds to go with the voices we hear of people we have never seen.  There exists a desire to "fit" certain intonations and accents with given appearances.  The question is, why?  If there's no relation that can reliably determine one from the other, why do we still pursue the idea that there is?  Why do we form expectations of our senses based on the others?  It's not just limited to sight and sound either, our other senses develop expectations of their own.  When we see something that appears sharp, we anticipate sharpness when we touch it, and any sensation to the contrary still surprises us.  While this can be useful in terms of caution and pre-empting harm, where does the perception of a face from a voice come from?  What exactly do we achieve from doing so?