PT  - JOURNAL ARTICLE
AU  - Michelle Magee
AU  - Courtney Lewis
AU  - Gustavo Noffs
AU  - Hannah Reece
AU  - Jess C. S. Chan
AU  - Charissa J. Zaga
AU  - Camille Paynter
AU  - Olga Birchall
AU  - Sandra Rojas Azocar
AU  - Angela Ediriweera
AU  - Marja W. Caverlé
AU  - Benjamin G. Schultz
AU  - Adam P. Vogel
TI  - Effects of face masks on acoustic analysis and speech perception: Implications for peri-pandemic protocols
AID  - 10.1101/2020.10.06.327452
DP  - 2020 Jan 01
TA  - bioRxiv
PG  - 2020.10.06.327452
4099  - http://biorxiv.org/content/early/2020/10/08/2020.10.06.327452.short
4100  - http://biorxiv.org/content/early/2020/10/08/2020.10.06.327452.full
AB  - Wearing face masks (alongside physical distancing) provides some protection against infection from COVID-19. Face masks can also change how we communicate and subsequently affect speech signal quality. Here we investigated how three face mask types (N95, surgical and cloth) affect acoustic analysis of speech and perceived intelligibility in healthy subjects. We compared speech produced with and without the different masks on acoustic measures of timing, frequency, perturbation and power spectral density. Speech clarity was also examined using a standardized intelligibility tool by blinded raters. Mask type impacted the power distribution in frequencies above 3kHz for both the N95 and surgical masks. Measures of timing and spectral tilt also differed across mask conditions. Cepstral and harmonics to noise ratios remained flat across mask type. No differences were observed across conditions for word or sentence intelligibility measures. Our data show that face masks change the speech signal, but some specific acoustic features remain largely unaffected (e.g., measures of voice quality) irrespective of mask type. Outcomes have bearing on how future speech studies are run when personal protective equipment is worn.Competing Interest StatementAPV, CL and MM work for Redenlab, a speech analytics company.