Arai has developed several physical models of the human vocal tract for education and has reported that they are intuitive and helpful for students of acoustics and speech science. We first reviewed dynamic models, including the sliding three-tube (S3T) model and the flexible-tongue model. We then developed a head-shaped model with a sliding tongue, which has the advantages of both the S3T and ...

The scientific bases for human-machine communication by voice are in the fields of psychology, linguistics, acoustics, signal processing, computer science, and integrated circuit technology. The purpose of this paper is to highlight the basic scientific and technological issues in human-machine communication by voice and to point out areas of future research opportunity. The discussion is organ...

We describe our recent work on improving an overlapping articulatory feature (sub-phonemic) based speech recognizer with robustness to the requirement of training data. A new decision-tree algorithm is developed and applied to the recognizer design which results in hierarchical partitioning of the articulatory state space. The articulatory states associated with common acoustic correlates, a ph...

This chapter discusses a series of four user-oriented design analysis problems in a research prototype multimodal spoken language dialogue system for supporting drivers whilst driving. The problems are: (a) when should the system (not) listen to the speech and non-speech acoustics in the car; (b) how to make use of the in-car display in conjunction with spoken driver-system dialogue; (c) how to...

We report our new development of a hidden trajectory model for co-articulated, time-varying patterns of speech. The model uses bi-directional filtering of vocal tract resonance targets to jointly represent contextual variation and phonetic reduction in speech acoustics. A novel maximum-likelihood-based learning algorithm is presented that accurately estimates the distributional parameters of th...

This paper presents technical refinements and extensions of our system for correlating audible and visible components of speech behavior and subsequently using those correlates to generate realistic talking faces. Introduction of nonlinear estimation techniques has improved our ability to generate facial motion either from the speech acoustics or from orofacial muscle EMG. Also, preliminary evi...

Attending to one speaker in multi-speaker situations is challenging. One neural mechanism proposed to underlie the ability to attend to a particular speaker is phase-locking of low-frequency activity in auditory cortex to speech's temporal envelope ("speech-tracking"), which is more precise for attended speech. However, it is not known what brings about this attentional effect, and specifically...

An acoustic survey of secondary schools in England has been undertaken. Room acoustic parameters and background noise levels were measured in 185 unoccupied spaces in 13 schools to provide information on the typical acoustic environment of secondary schools. The unoccupied acoustic and noise data were correlated with various physical characteristics of the spaces. Room height and the amount of ...

The context-dependent modeling technique is extended to include non-speech ller segments occurring between speech word units. In addition to the conventional context-dependent word or subword units, the proposed acoustic modeling provides an e cient way of accounting for the effects of the surrounding speech on the inter-word non-speech segments, especially for small vocabulary recognition task...

We use the lossy electric transmission—line analog model of the vocal tract to study the acoustics of speech produced in a hyperbaric helium— oxygen atmosphere. The analysis extends previous work by including more completely the effects of the wall vibration, glottal, and radiation impedances, and by analyzing the formant bandwidths and amplitudes in addition to the formant frequencies. It show...