  Electrodes for decoding speech from electromyography (EMG) are typically
placed on the face, requiring adhesives that are inconvenient and
skin-irritating if used regularly. We explore a different device form factor,
where dry electrodes are placed around the neck instead. 11-word, multi-speaker
voiced EMG classifiers trained on data recorded with this device achieve 92.7%
accuracy. Ablation studies reveal the importance of having more than two
electrodes on the neck, and phonological analyses reveal similar classification
confusions between neck-only and neck-and-face form factors. Finally,
speech-EMG correlation experiments demonstrate a linear relationship between
many EMG spectrogram frequency bins and self-supervised speech representation
dimensions.
