Electrodes for decoding speech from electromyography (EMG) are typically placed on the face, requiring adhesives that are inconvenient and skin-irritating if used regularly. We explore a different device form factor, where dry electrodes are placed around the neck instead. 11-word, multi-speaker voiced EMG classifiers trained on data recorded with this device achieve 92.7% accuracy. Ablation studies reveal the importance of having more than two electrodes on the neck, and phonological analyses reveal similar classification confusions between neck-only and neck-and-face form factors. Finally, speech-EMG correlation experiments demonstrate a linear relationship between many EMG spectrogram frequency bins and self-supervised speech representation dimensions.
Cite
@article{arxiv.2407.21345,
title = {Towards EMG-to-Speech with a Necklace Form Factor},
author = {Peter Wu and Ryan Kaveh and Raghav Nautiyal and Christine Zhang and Albert Guo and Anvitha Kachinthaya and Tavish Mishra and Bohan Yu and Alan W Black and Rikky Muller and Gopala Krishna Anumanchipalli},
journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:2407.21345},
year = {2024}
}