Nosey: Open-source hardware for acoustic nasalance

TL;DR

Nosey is an open-source, low-cost, customizable hardware system for acoustic nasalance measurement, offering a flexible alternative to commercial devices with comparable phonological environment differentiation.

Contribution

This paper introduces Nosey, the first open-source hardware system for acoustic nasalance measurement, enabling accessible and customizable nasometry research.

Findings

Nosey shows higher nasalance scores than commercial devices.

The contrast between phonological environments is comparable across systems.

Nosey can be customized with different microphones and materials.

Abstract

We introduce Nosey (Nasalance Open Source Estimation sYstem), a low-cost, customizable, 3D-printed system for recording acoustic nasalance data that we have made available as open-source hardware (http://github.com/phoneticslab/nosey). We first outline the motivations and design principles behind our hardware nasalance system, and then present a comparison between Nosey and a commercial nasalance device. Nosey shows consistently higher nasalance scores than the commercial device, but the magnitude of contrast between phonological environments is comparable between systems. We also review ways of customizing the hardware to facilitate testing, such as comparison of microphones and different construction materials. We conclude that Nosey is a flexible and cost-effective alternative to commercial nasometry devices and propose some methodological considerations for its use in data collection.