Study of Articulator Dynamics
Joan E. Miller, J. R. Pierce, M. V. Mathews · The Journal of the Acoustical Society of America · 1962
A program for pitch-synchronous formant tracking is described which operates semiautomatically on voiced portions of speech. Given the approximate pitch of a section of speech, the program locates the pitch periods, makes a spectral analysis of successive periods, locates 4 formants in each period by spectral fitting, and plots the formant trajectories and pitch for the sequence of periods. The program can also inverse filter to obtain the glottal waveform. The program is applied to study the dynamics of formant transitions as a function of speaking rate. The observed transitions are compared with the transitions which would be obtained from a simple mechanical-articulator model, in which the vocal-tract walls are represented by masses with damping driven by a suddenly applied muscular force.