On the use of accelerometer sensors to study nasalization in speech and singing voice

Overview & Synopsis

This paper presents first results of a study aiming to explore data coming from nose mounted accelerometer during speech and singing tasks. One objective was to study the variations in the piezoelectric signal under variable speech and singing voice productions. Thus, only high-pitch and high-level singing are considered in this study. Four speakers (2 males, 2 females) produced isolated vowels, CVC and VCV non-words in nasal and non-nasal consonantal contexts. Our results suggest that the discrimination of nasal consonants remains possible in singing voice. A second part of this study investigates the correlation between acoustic and piezoelectric signals in vocalic sounds. A relative stable transfer function, with a frequency dip at low frequency around 500 Hz could be measured in our data. Results highlight a relative stable transfer function between audio and accelerometer signal for the vowels.