ROBUST PHONETIC FEATURES IN BONE-CONDUCTED SPEECH COMMUNICATION

Bone conduction (BC) has attracted attention as an alternative sound transmission method in loud environments, as well as in environments where air conduction (AC) cannot be used. This is because BC uses different sound transmission paths than air conduction. However, the speech produced by a sound transmitted through BC is not as intelligible as that transmitted through AC. In addition, the speech intelligibility of BC sounds as recorded by the BC microphone was lower than that of the AC sound. In this study, we investigated the possibility of communicating using both BC microphones and transducers in a loud environment. To investigate this, we recorded speech using the BC and AC microphones and measured the speech intelligibility using the BC transducer. The results show that the BC sound lost some phonetic features when compared to the AC sound; however, it conserved some phonetic features. Therefore, we conclude that improving the intelligibility of these lost phonetic features can enhance BC speech communication.