Recovering area functions from acoustics and midsagittal profiles.
Richard S. McGowan, Rebecca W. McGowan · The Journal of the Acoustical Society of America · 2009
Simultaneously recorded midsagittal pellet positions and acoustic output for several subjects comprise the Wisconsin X-Ray Microbeam Speech Production Database (XRMB-SPD). An articulatory synthesizer, EASY, was used to help recover area function parameters corresponding to the production of vowels by subjects in the XRMB-SPD by means of analysis-by-synthesis. Specifically, for each subject, an initial personalized midsagittal profile was created based on the pellet positions, pellet trace, and pharyngeal wall trace during neutral vowel production. Based on the scales of this initial profile for a subject, subsequent midsagittal profiles were generated from the pellet data during various vowel productions. Each midsagittal profile and the corresponding first three formant frequencies were used to optimize the parameters of an area function in the EASY for closest acoustic match. The optimization was performed with a genetic algorithm. The results are examined in terms of consistency within a subject for different vowels and consistency within vowel for different subjects. Synthesized examples of vowel production will also be presented. [Work partially supported by Grant DC-001247 to CReSS LLC.]