Effect of voice pitch control training using a two-dimensional tactile feedback display system

Abstract

It is difficult for the deafblind or the hearing impaired to control the pitch of their voice because they cannot perceive it. In particular, when singing, it is very difficult for them to control their voice pitch because they need to maintain a stable tone. We have developed a voice pitch control system to assist such people in their singing by means of a tactile display. Using this tactile feedback system, we verified in a previous study that two deafblind subjects were able to control the pitch of their voices with as much accuracy as hearing children. By using this tactile 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. They sung using not only tactile feedback but also proprioceptive feedback. In this paper, we investigate the effect of voice pitch training, without auditory feedback, using our tactile feedback display system. Eight hearing participants were examined under two conditions-“without tactile feedback” and “with tactile feedback”-to ascertain their abilities to control their pitch while subjected to masking noise. The results indicated the subjects could sing with more accurate pitch using only proprioceptive feedback after tactile feedback pitch control training than that of before tactile feedback one.