On 18th March 2026, Ryoga Yamanaka (M1), Department of Electrical Engineering and Information Systems, received The 31st Best Student Presentation Award, The Acoustical Society of Japan.
About awarded research
In recent years, foreign language learning has seen attempts to create personalized audio materials utilizing advancing voice conversion technologies. In this context, we are exploring the use of the "self-perceived voice"—the voice that learners constantly hear while speaking. This study verified the effectiveness of a novel method for estimating the self-perceived voice, which generally sounds different from the recorded voice. The self-perceived voice is considered a summation of "air-conducted sound" (transmitted through the air) and "internal sound" (transmitted through the body). Conventionally, this was simulated by individually recording and synthesizing bone-conducted sounds from the ear and throat to represent the internal sound.
In this study, we focused on the phenomenon where internal vibrations vibrate the inner wall of the ear canal and are expressed as sound within the ear. We attempted to capture the internal sound more directly by measuring this vibration sound. The results confirmed that, for some subjects, this method could reproduce the self-perceived voice with higher accuracy than existing methods. This suggests the possibility of estimating the self-perceived voice using a simpler equipment configuration.
Your impression & future plan
I am deeply honored to receive this award. I would like to express my sincerest gratitude to my supervisors, Professor Minematsu and Associate Professor Saito, as well as to all the members of our laboratory, for their invaluable guidance and support throughout this research. I have been working on the topic of "foreign language learning using self-perceived voice" since my undergraduate studies. Building on the results of this research, I remain committed to further deepening this investigation and dedicating myself to my research activities with the goal of proposing novel approaches to language learning.