Effect of protective masks on voice parameters: acoustical analysis of sustained vowels

During the last two years the use of masks as personal protective equipment became necessary and mandatory to deal with the SARS-CoV-2 epidemiological emergency with impact on the quality and efficiency of verbal communication. This paper compares for the first time 7 different mask configurations. The sustained vowels /a/, /i/ and /u/ emitted by Italian speakers are considered. The purpose of this work is to evaluate whether the use of different types of masks, by themselves or worn together with a protective shield, may affect the acoustical parameters and thus voice quality. This is exploited by means of acoustical analysis performed with the BioVoice tool that estimates more than 20 parameters. For each vowel, the values of the fundamental frequency F0, the first two formant frequencies F1 and F2, jitter and noise are compared among the 7 configurations. Preliminary results show that for the three vowels there are few statistically significant differences among masks when worn alone, while the presence of the shield has a relevant impact on the signal energy above 1 kHz. Further studies are ongoing to analyze vocalic sentences in order to detect possible influence of the masks on vowel articulation.