# Affect Decoding in Phonated and Silent Speech Production from Surface EMG

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2603.11715 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2603.11715/

## Key facts

- Cited by 1 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 5 of its 40 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 12 Mar 2026.

## Builds on (most cited first, 5 of 5)

- [Robust Speech Recognition via Large-Scale Weak Supervision](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2212.04356/) (2022)
- [Digital Voicing of Silent Speech](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2010.02960/) (2020)
- [Silent Speech Interfaces for Speech Restoration: A Review](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2009.02110/) (2020)
- [Neural Codecs as Biosignal Tokenizers](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2510.09095/) (2025)
- [Articulatory Feature Prediction from Surface EMG during Speech Production](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2505.13814/) (2025)

## Built on by (most cited first, 1 of 1)

- [MyoCodec: A Streaming Neural Codec for Electromyography](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2609.36687/) (2026)

## Abstract (arXiv)

The expression of affect is integral to spoken communication, yet, its link to underlying articulatory execution remains unclear. Measures of articulatory muscle activity such as EMG could reveal how speech production is modulated by emotion alongside acoustic speech analyses. We investigate affect decoding from facial and neck surface electromyography (sEMG) during phonated and silent speech production. For this purpose, we introduce a dataset comprising 2,780 utterances from 12 participants across 3 tasks, on which we evaluate both intra- and inter-subject decoding using a range of features and model embeddings. Our results reveal that EMG representations reliably discriminate frustration with up to 0.845 AUC, and generalize well across articulation modes. Our ablation study further demonstrates that affective signatures are embedded in facial motor activity and persist in the absence of phonation, highlighting the potential of EMG sensing for affect-aware silent speech interfaces.