Back

Postural and muscular effects of upper-limb movements on voicing

Pouw, W.; Burchardt, L. S.; Selen, L.

2023-03-09 neuroscience
10.1101/2023.03.08.531710 bioRxiv
Show abstract

Voice production can be a whole-body affair: Upper limb movements physically impact the voice in steady-state vocalization, speaking, and singing. This is supposedly due to biomechanical impulses on the chest-wall, affecting subglottal pressure. Unveiling such biomechanics is important, as humans gesture with their hands in a synchronized way with speaking. Here we assess biomechanical interactions between arm movements and the voice, by measurement of key (respiratory-related) muscles with electromyography (EMG) during different types of upper limb movement while measuring the bodys center of mass. We show that gesture-related muscle activations scale with positive peaks in the voices amplitude. Some of these muscles also strongly associate with changes in the center mass, confirming that gesture-vocal coupling partly arises due to posture-related muscle activity. If replicated, these results suggest an evolutionary ancient gesture-vocal connection at the level of biomechanics. These preliminary results will support a pre-registration of analyses for a larger-scale confirmatory study.

Matching journals

The top 5 journals account for 50% of the predicted probability mass.

50% of probability mass above

"Similar papers" are the closest papers from that journal in the model's embedding space. They show what the match is built on, but the ranking comes mostly from a classifier over the whole training set, not from these examples alone.