Effects of hand postures on voice directivity.

While speaking, hand postures, such as holding a hand in front of the mouth or cupping the hands around the mouth, influence human voice directivity. This study presents and analyzes spherical voice directivity datasets of an articulated [a] with and without hand postures. The datasets were determined from measurements with 13 subjects in a surrounding spherical microphone array with 32 microphones and then upsampled to a higher spatial resolution. The results show that hand postures strongly impact voice directivity and affect the directivity index by up to 6 dB, which is more than variances caused by phoneme-dependent differences.