Voice Pitch Control Using a Two-Dimensional Tactile Display

概要

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It is difficult for the deafblind, or the hearing impaired, to control the pitch of theirvoice because they cannot perceive it. In particular, when singing, it is very difficult for themto control the pitch of their voice because they need to maintain a stable tone. We have developeda voice pitch control system to assist their singing by means of a tactile display. Using thistactile feedback system, we verified in a previous study that two deafblind subjects were ableto control the pitch of their voices with as much accuracy as hearing children. By using thistactile feedback system, the correspondence between musical scale and proprioceptive sensation(muscular sensation, and so on) of the two subjects was returned to pre-hearing loss levels. Theysung using not only tactile feedback but also proprioceptive feedback. In this paper, we investigatethe ability of hearing subjects to control the pitch of their voice using our tactile feedbacksystem, but without auditory feedback. Seven hearing participants were examined under twoconditions—“without tactile feedback” and “with tactile feedback”—to ascertain their abilitiesto control their pitch while subjected to a masking noise. The results indicated that hearingsubjects could not sing with an accurate pitch using only the proprioceptive feedback (“withouttactile feedback” condition).