Tactile pitch feedback system for deafblind or hearing impaired persons singing accuracy of hearing persons under conditions of added noise

Deafblind and hearing impaired persons cannot perceive their own voice pitch, and thus have difficulty controlling it. While singing, the voice pitch needs to be controlled to maintain a stable tone. To address this problem, a tactile voice pitch control system was developed to assist such people in singing. In a previous study, two deafblind subjects used the proposed system to control their voice pitch with accuracy comparable to that of the hearing children. In the present study, we investigate the proprioceptive pitch control and the effect of the proposed voice pitch control system on normal-hearing people under conditions of added noise. The results show that the total average mean deviation without tactile feedback is 405.6 cents (SD: 42.4), whereas, with tactile feedback, it is 57.5 cents (SD: 12.2).