listening to bone conduction
Bone conduction isn't pretty, especially when isolated and amplified.
I know this from a happy accident.
I was at the Listening Centre in Toronto having my ears tuned up, wearing earphones that gave me air and bone conducted sound—the latter stimulating my cochlea through an electromechanical transducer embedded in the earphone and touching the mastoid bone. I had just started my session for the day which consisted of repeating poetry that was spoken by a woman.
The sound of my voice was filtered at a high level—the lower frequencies being attenuated. When I started repeating what I heard, I became aware that something was wrong: I didn't feel right. After a minute or so, I figured out that I didn't have my headphones on correctly. The transducer wasn't touching my skull, so I wasn't getting bone-conducted sound.
So I adjusted my headphones—and bam! The difference between having the transduce touch my skull or not touch my skull was very clear.
You can't hear what I experienced on this page; but in visual terms, it was like going from two dimensions to three. The tickle of tone in my ear and head had a distinct feeling to it. Without it—without the transducer touching my head—there was no depth of tone, no ring, no center of the tone. Just a hollowness. Being deprived of bone conduction stimulation left me feeling cut off, both auditorially and psychologically (the latter deserves a separate post).
So I proceeded to do what any curious guy in my situation would do.
I experimented with shifting the headphones so that the transducer touched and didn’t touch my skull—all the while watching my face with a hand mirror while speaking and singing.
What did I learn in the process?
Bone conduction is the feeling of the tone. It leads the voice.
Without heightened bone conduction, the face will not 'open.'
Bone conduction is buzzy and associated with the vowel /i/.
Bone conduction is hum-like.
Bone conduction makes the bones sing.
The phonemes 'm', 'n' and 'ng' aid it.
When highly developed, bone conduction is heard in the center of the head, towards the front of the face, as well as downward through the throat to the sternum and pelvis.
Bone conduction joins with air conduction at the front of the mouth—fior di labbra.
Highly concentrated bone conduction results in clarity of vowel.
The voice is heard 'stereophonically' when bone conduction is highly concentrated and vowels are clear.
