Determining tongue body motion from the acoustic speechwave
Edward H. Hafer, Cecil H. Coker · The Journal of the Acoustical Society of America · 1975
A technique is described for estimating vocal-tract areas and articulatory parameters from speech sounds. Voiced sounds are analyzed by the covariance method to obtain predictor coefficients. Three or more resonance frequencies are determined; the bandwidth estimates are discarded. Corrections are made to account for inductive yielding walls of the vocal tract. Using a gradient technique, parameters of an articulatory model are manipulated to obtain best fits to the analyzed data. This method avoids the usual tenuous assumptions about vocal-cord spectra and about the distribution of losses in the vocal tract. Results of applying the method to vowels and short words with velar consonants are presented.