Vowel constrictions are recoverable from formants

Vowel constrictions are recoverable from formants

The area function of the vocal tract in all of its spatial detail is not directly computable from the speech signal. But is partial, yet phonetically distinctive, information about articulation recoverable from the acoustic signal that arrives at the listener's ear? The answer to this question is important for phonetics, because various theories of speech perception predict different answers. S...

How far are vowel formants from computed vocal tract resonances?

We compare numerically computed resonances of the human vocal tract with formants that have been extracted from speech during vowel pronunciation. The geometry of the vocal tract has been obtained by MRI from a male subject, and the corresponding speech has been recorded simultaneously. The resonances are computed by solving the Helmholtz partial differential equation with the Finite Element Me...

Vowel formants from the wave equation.

This article describes modal analysis of acoustic waves in the human vocal tract while the subject is pronouncing [o]. The model used is the wave equation in three dimensions, together with physically relevant boundary conditions. The geometry is reconstructed from anatomical MRI data obtained by other researchers. The computations are carried out using the finite element method. The model is v...

Vowel recognition: Formants, Spectral Peaks,

Vowel Perception with Virtual Formants

This study examines the potential role of the auditory spectral integration in phonetic vowel quality decisions. Synthetic stimuli included a “virtual formant (F2)” which was produced by inserting two pairs of sine waves below and above a “perceptual target frequency” (the spectral center-of-gravity, COG). Intensity weighting across the pairs of sine waves created a virtual F2, i.e., an F2 perc...