VCV Synthesis Using Task Dynamics to Animate a Factor-Based Articulatory Model

This paper presents an initial architecture for articulatory synthesis which combines a dynamical system for the control of vocal tract shaping with a novel MATLAB implementation of an articulatory synthesizer. The dynamical system controls a speaker-specific vocal tract model derived by factor analysis of mid-sagittal real-time MRI data and provides input to the articulatory synthesizer, which simulates the propagation of sound waves in the vocal tract. First, parameters of the dynamical system are estimated from real-time MRI data of human speech production. Second, vocal-tract dynamics is simulated for vowel-consonant-vowel utterances using a sequence of two dynamical systems: the first one starts from a vowel vocal-tract configuration and achieves a vocal-tract closure; the second one starts from the closure and achieves the target configuration of the second vowel. Third, vocal-tract dynamics is converted to area function dynamics and is input to the synthesizer to generate the acoustic signal. Synthesized vowel-consonant-vowel examples demonstrate the feasibility of the method.