> Completely tone-deaf person would not be able to recognize voices, e.g. tell male voice from female, father's voice from mother's. I find this hard to believ

> Completely tone-deaf person would not be able to recognize voices, e.g. tell male voice from female, father's voice from mother's. I find this hard to believe. Human voice has a lot of timbral characteristics that show up on a spectrogram view. It would also imply that a person would be unable to tell the difference between a piano, a guitar and a trombone. This would also make understanding speech very difficult. Do people (with otherwise normal hearing) like this exist? This is pretty different from not being able to distinguish musical pitch, say tell C# from Bb, or be able to tell which one of the pitches is higher.