ISCA Archive Interspeech 2016
ISCA Archive Interspeech 2016

Respiratory Belts and Whistles: A Preliminary Study of Breathing Acoustics for Turn-Taking

Marcin Włodarczak, Mattias Heldner

This paper presents first results on using acoustic intensity of inhalations as a cue to speech initiation in spontaneous multiparty conversations. We demonstrate that inhalation intensity significantly differentiates between cycles coinciding with no speech activity, shorter (< 1 s) and longer stretches of speech. While the model fit is relatively weak, it is comparable to the fit of a model using kinematic features collected with Respiratory Inductance Plethysmography. We also show that incorporating both kinematic and acoustic features further improves the model. Given the ease of capturing breath acoustics, we consider the results to be a promising first step towards studying communicative functions of respiratory sounds. We discuss possible extensions to the data collection procedure with a view to improving predictive power of the model.