Articulatory speech synthesis based upon fluid dynamic principles

Abstract

In this paper, an articulatory speech synthesizer based on fluid dynamic principles is presented. The key idea is to devise a refined speech production model based on the most fundamental physics of the human vocal apparatus. Our articulatory synthesizer essentially contains two parts: a vocal fold model which represents the excitation source and a vocal tract model, which describes the positions of articulators. First, we propose a combined minimum error and minimum jerk criterion to estimated the moving vocal tract shapes during speech production. Second, we propose a nonlinear mechanical model to generate the vocal fold excitation signals. Finally, a computational fluid dynamics (CFD) approach is used to solve the Reynolds-averaged Navier-Stokes (RANS) equations, which are the governing equations of speech production inside vocal apparatus. Experimental results show that our system can synthesize intelligible continuous speech sentences while naturally handling the co-articulation effects during speech production.