Acoustically-guided articulation patterns for vowel production
Brad H. Story · The Journal of the Acoustical Society of America · 2005
The purpose of this study was to investigate the link between the vocal tract deformation patterns obtained from statistical analyses of articulatory data (i.e., measured area functions) and the acoustic properties of a realistic neutral vocal tract shape. The starting point was a previously reported statistical analysis (i.e., PCA) of a speaker-specific set of measured vowel area functions. It resulted in a mean area function, and two basis functions that perturb the vocal tract into vowel-like shapes. In the present study, acoustic sensitivity functions were calculated for the same mean area function. Then, four separate sum and difference combinations of the sensitivity functions were used directly to perturb the mean area function. The results showed that these sum and difference combinations created deformation patterns with nearly the same variation along the vocal tract length as the basis functions derived from articulatory data. The procedure was then applied to other speaker-specific sets of area functions and the results were similar. [Work supported by NIH R01-DC04789.]