Plug-and-Play Microphones for Recording Speech and Voice with Smart Devices.
Gustavo Noffs, Matthew Cobler-Lichter, Thushara Perera and 5 others
PMID 37972580WHAT IT FOUND
Consumer plug-and-play microphones matched the reference microphone only for pitch and vowel formant movement.
They did not reliably measure most other speech features, and group differences became weaker, so use the same microphone throughout.
Key findings
01Mean fundamental frequency and its variation agreed very closely between the tested microphones and the reference microphone.
02Second formant movement came closest to known clinical differences, but most other frequency and timing measures diverged widely.
03Consumer microphone scores correlated strongly with the reference, yet separation between healthy speakers and people with MS weakened when consumer devices were used.
STILL TO COME
How it was doneWhat they foundWhat it means for SLPs
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What it does not show
This was a preliminary experiment with a low speech sample size, so some measurements did not follow the pattern needed for precise agreement estimates. Eighteen participants were included, but recordings from one healthy speaker's sustained vowel and two people with MS were excluded or corrupted. The tested consumer setups were only three configurations of the 6th generation iPod Touch, and the authors could not confirm that the same in-built microphone sensor is used in other iPhones or iPads. The study compared measurement differences with differences reported in other clinical groups, not with a treatment effect measured in this study.
Declared interests
This work was funded by National Health and Medical Research Council of Australia Grant 1085461, which paid data collection costs and research stipends for named authors. Adam Vogel and Gustavo Noffs were employees of Redenlab Inc. Other disclosures included NHMRC or Multiple Sclerosis Research Australia grant support, and some authors had nothing to disclose.
The easy way to misread this
Do not conclude that plug-and-play microphones are interchangeable with professional recording equipment. The tested consumer setups were reliable only for pitch and second formant movement; most other speech measures varied widely, and results cannot be generalized to other devices.