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Bone conduction can help you distinguish between your own voice and the voices of others, according to a new study published in Royal Society Open Science. Bone conduction refers to the process by which sound waves travel through the bones of the skull and inner ear instead of through the air in the ear canal.
Our own voice often sounds strange and unusual when played back to us in a recording. This is partly the result of the lack of bone contact, which changes the acoustic properties of our voice. This has made it difficult to study self-awareness, making it one of the few studies of self-awareness. The researchers behind the new study wanted to use a relatively new technology – bone-conduction headphones – to overcome this problem.
“We found it surprising that hearing our own voice feels so unnatural to us,” said study author Pavo Orepich, a postdoctoral fellow at the Laboratory of Cognitive Neuroscience at the University of Geneva. “Furthermore, hearing one’s own voice is often uncomfortable. This is strange because our voice is the voice we associate with ourselves, it plays a vital role in our daily lives and is our primary form of communication.
The researchers conducted three studies to investigate voice discrimination in human subjects. The participants in all three studies (a total of 84) were right-handed, had no hearing impairment, and had no history of psychiatric or neurological disorders.
In each study, participants were asked to produce the phoneme /a/ sound for 1–2 seconds. Audio recordings of their voices were normalized for intensity and duration and background noises were removed.
The resulting 500 ms clips were then combined with pre-processed audio recordings to create multiple audio morphs. These sound morphs contain the continuity between the two sounds. In other words, the voice morphs are 85% human A voice and 15% human voice, 70% human A voice and 30% human voice, etc.
The sound morphs were presented to the participants via air transmission (using laptop speakers or headphones) or through bone-conduction headphones.
Bone conduction headphones work by transmitting sound vibrations through the bones of the skull. The headphones typically rest on the cheeks or temple and use tiny transducers to convert electrical signals into vibrations that are sent directly to the inner ear.
In Studies 1 and 2, participants were instructed to indicate whether the morph they heard resembled their own or another person’s voice. The voice morphs were between a stranger’s voice and their own voice (Study 1) or a familiar other person’s voice and a stranger’s voice (Study 2).
In study 3, participants were accompanied by a friend of the same gender and age. Each pair performed self-other and familiar-other tone discrimination tasks (air or bone) as described in Studies 1 and 2. The researchers examined whether the participants could recognize their unrecorded voice.
Orepich and his colleagues found that bone manipulation improved voice discrimination if the task involved self-vowel morphs. Results from Studies 1 and 3 suggest that participants were better at distinguishing other people’s voices and naming their own voices when they heard the voices in their bones rather than in the air.
But bone contact only helped people identify themselves. His own Voice from other voices. Study 2 showed that it did not help participants distinguish between familiar and unfamiliar voices of others.
“When we speak, our skull vibrates and our brain processes not only the sound of our voice, but also these vibrations. Our study showed that participants perceived their voice better when they heard it through bone-conduction headphones compared to regular headphones,” Orepich told PsyPost.
“By adding an additional vibration signal to our own voice, we have made the experience of hearing our own voice more natural. Our research suggests that our voice is not just a sound, but a fundamentally multi-sensory construct.”
Interestingly, participants often mistakenly identified the familiar voices as their own. This happens when the normal voice sounds different from their own. This suggests that we are more likely to confuse the voice we know because we are so used to hearing our own voice.
“It was surprising that participants often identified the familiar sounds as their own compared to the unfamiliar sounds,” Orepich said. This suggests that familiarity strategies influence self-voice perception.
The researchers pointed out that the way we naturally perceive our own voice also includes the motor signals associated with speech production. “When we hear our own voice in natural situations, when we speak, it is inevitable that there are motor signals that were not tested in our study,” explained Orepich. “The presence of such motor signals and associated oral and pharyngeal sensory speech-related signals may have an additional effect on self-voice perception.”
The findings have clinical implications for conditions such as schizophrenia.
“This work can be used as a cover to test clinical diagnoses of a very common and highly distressing psychotic symptom—audio-verbal hallucinations, namely ‘hearing voices,'” Orepich told PsyPost. “While we don’t yet know why people with dementia hear voices in their heads, there is a lot of evidence to suggest that the blurring of other voices is related to not recognizing one’s own voice.”
The study, “Bone Conduction Facilitates Self-Other Voice Discrimination,” was written by Pavo Orepić, Oliver Alan Kanape, Nathan Fiver, and Olaf Blanke.
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