Earlier this year, I took a break from my phone for a full week while on vacation in Mexico. My somewhat impulsive decision to forgo an international plan and leave my phone in my hotel room led to one or two tricky situations. But mainly, it was refreshing to live in the present moment. I had been feeling fatigued by social media before the trip – Instagram being my particular vice – so by the end, it truly felt like I’d gone through a detox.

When I inevitably returned to my device, I felt newly, palpably aware of how much time I was wasting on social media. Why was I so easily consumed by parking lot spats, celebrity interviews and videos with captions like ‘___ will leave you speechless’, none of which had any real significance beyond holding my attention? The feeling reminded me of a quote I’d once encountered, about how easy it is to be distracted by disposable content. It perfectly summed up what’s so quietly frustrating about social media these days, but the irony was that I couldn’t remember the exact quote, or even where I’d seen it, due to the sheer amount of content I regularly consume.

I looked everywhere for the origin. I revisited my YouTube history and Instagram posts I’d ‘liked’, feeling horrified at how much time I had spent in the digital world. I thought for sure it was a quote from the YouTuber Mina Le’s insightful video ‘Why Is Social Media Not Fun Anymore?’, or from an audiobook I’d enjoyed. No, it must have been mentioned in one of the countless Instagram Reels that the algorithm has calculatedly served me. Eventually, I gave up my search, a decision that, in itself, was its own relief from the endless cycle of content consumption.

The sound of Christopher Walken’s voice is so embedded in my memory that it takes hardly any time to place it, even when it comes from the mouth of, say, a squirrel in a TV ad. Few celebrity voices are easier to recognise – or inspire more imitations – than his.

Is there some intrinsic quality that makes voices such as Walken’s especially memorable, whether they’re famous or not? While my own voice probably melts into the background for most who hear it, when I think of highly recognisable voices, some ordinary people spring to mind: a sixth-grade teacher, my cross-country coach, etc. Maybe others who heard them felt the same way.

Wilma Bainbridge and her colleagues had already found that some faces are more memorable than others – more likely to be recognised not just by one observer or another, but by people generally. The same has been found for objects, words and works of art. In a recent set of studies, Bainbridge, Cambria Revsine and Esther Goldberg at the University of Chicago explored whether voices differ in their memorability as well.

Thousands of participants listened to a series of clips: a procession of different voices that each spoke the same words (eg, ‘Don’t ask me to carry an oily rag like that’). The listeners’ job was to report when the same voice was repeated. Their success rates allowed the researchers to find out whether certain voices were more memorable on the whole.

Some voices were, indeed, stickier than others. The team also found evidence that quantifiable voice characteristics, such as the base pitch and speed, were collectively predictive of voice memorability. These results raise the possibility, the researchers say, that: ‘Tools could be developed to enhance the features that contribute to voice memorability’ – making a not-so-memorable voice, perhaps, a bit more Walkenesque.