ISCA Archive Eurospeech 1993
ISCA Archive Eurospeech 1993

Recovery of vocal tract midsagittal and area functions from speech signal for vowels and fricative consonants

Denis Beautemps, Pierre Badin, Rafael Laboissiere

This study deals with the ill-posed problem of inversion of the articulatory-to-acoustic relationship, i.e. the recovery of vocal tract geometry from formant frequencies. A small database of articulatory-acoustic data has been established for one subject. A midsagittal-to-area function conversion model, which works both for vowels and fricative consonants, has been developed from these data. This model has finally been used as a major constraint for an optimisation algorithm based on a gradient descent technique, in order to regularise the solution and solve the inversion problem. Other spatial and temporal smoothing constraints have been also used. Single configurations, as well as entire [VC] sequences could be recovered, using adequate initial conditions.