Synthesis of VV utterances from muscle activation to sound with a 3d model

Saeed Dabbaghchian, Marc Arnela, Olov Engwall, Oriol Guasch

Research output: Indexed journal article Conference articlepeer-review

5 Citations (Scopus)

Abstract

We propose a method to automatically generate deformable 3D vocal tract geometries from the surrounding structures in a biomechanical model. This allows us to couple 3D biomechanics and acoustics simulations. The basis of the simulations is muscle activation trajectories in the biomechanical model, which move the articulators to the desired articulatory positions. The muscle activation trajectories for a vowel-vowel utterance are here defined through interpolation between the determined activations of the start and end vowel. The resulting articulatory trajectories of flesh points on the tongue surface and jaw are similar to corresponding trajectories measured using Electromagnetic Articulography, hence corroborating the validity of interpolating muscle activation. At each time step in the articulatory transition, a 3D vocal tract tube is created through a cavity extraction method based on first slicing the geometry of the articulators with a semi-polar grid to extract the vocal tract contour in each plane and then reconstructing the vocal tract through a smoothed 3D mesh-generation using the extracted contours. A finite element method applied to these changing 3D geometries simulates the acoustic wave propagation. We present the resulting acoustic pressure changes on the vocal tract boundary and the formant transitions for the utterance [Ai].

Original languageEnglish
Pages (from-to)3497-3501
Number of pages5
JournalProceedings of the Annual Conference of the International Speech Communication Association, INTERSPEECH
Volume2017-August
DOIs
Publication statusPublished - 2017
Event18th Annual Conference of the International Speech Communication Association, INTERSPEECH 2017 - Stockholm, Sweden
Duration: 20 Aug 201724 Aug 2017

Keywords

  • Acoustic model
  • Air-Tight geometry
  • Biomechanical model
  • Deformable vocal tract
  • Finite Element Method
  • Speech production
  • Vowel-vowel sequences

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