Investigating phoneme-dependencies of spherical voice directivity patterns II: Various groups of phonemes

Abstract

The substantial variation between articulated phonemes is a fundamental feature of human voice production. However, while the spectral and temporal aspects of the phonemes have been extensively studied, few have investigated the spatial aspects and analyzed phoneme-dependent differences in voice directivity. This paper extends our previous research focusing on the directivity patterns of selected vowels and fricatives [Pörschmann and Arend, J. Acoust. Soc. Am. 149(6), 4553-4564 (2021)] and examines different groups of phonemes, such as plosives, nasals, voiced alveolars, and additional fricatives. For this purpose, full-spherical voice directivity measurements were performed for 13 persons while they articulated the respective phonemes. The sound radiation was recorded simultaneously using a surrounding spherical microphone array with 32 microphones and then spatially upsampled to a dense sampling grid. Based on these upsampled datasets, the spherical voice directivity was studied, and phoneme-dependent variations were analyzed. The results show significant differences between the groups of phonemes. However, within three groups (plosives, nasals, and voiced alveolars), the differences are small, and the variations in the directivity index were statistically insignificant.