Visualization of hypopharyngeal cavities and vocal tract acoustic modeling

Kiyoshi Honda (1) , Tatsuya Kitamura (2) , Hironori Takemoto (3) , Seiji Adachi (4) , Parham Mokhtari (3, 5) , Sayoko Takano (6) , Yukiko Nota (6) , Hiroyuki Hirata (3) , Ichiro Fujimoto (6) , Yasuhiro Shimada (6) , Shinobu Masaki (6) , Satoru Fujita (7) , Jianwu Dang (8)

1 LPP - LPP - Laboratoire de Phonétique et Phonologie - UMR 7018
2 Faculty of Intelligence & Informatics [Kobe]
3 Universal Media Research Center [Kyoto]
4 Fraunhofer IBP - Fraunhofer Institute for Building Physics [Stuttgart]
5 PAROLE - Analysis, perception and recognition of speech
6 Brain Activity Imaging Center [Kyoto]
7 AI Inc. [Kyoto]
8 HIP/JAIST - Human Information Processing Laboratory - Japanese Advances Institute of Science and Technology [Ishikawa]

The hypopharyngeal cavities consist of the laryngeal cavity and bilateral piriform fossa, constituting the bottom part of the vocal tract near the larynx. Visualisation of these cavities with magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) techniques reveals that during speech, the laryngeal cavity takes the form of a long-neck flask and the piriform fossa takes the form of a goblet of varying shapes: the former diminishes greatly in whispering and the latter disappears during deep inhalation. These cavities have been shown to exert significant acoustic effects at higher frequency spectra. In this study, acoustic experiments were conducted for male and female mechanical vocal tracts with the results that acoustic effects of those cavities determine the frequency spectra above 2 kHz, giving rise to peaks and zeros. An acoustic model of vowel production was proposed with three components: voice source, hypopharyngeal cavities and vocal tract proper, which provides effective means in controlling voice quality and expressing individual vocal characteristics.

Mots clés: hypopharynx; laryngeal cavity; piriform fossa; vocal tract; acoustic modeling

Domaines: Linguistique

Kiyoshi Honda, Tatsuya Kitamura, Hironori Takemoto, Seiji Adachi, Parham Mokhtari, et al.. Visualization of hypopharyngeal cavities and vocal tract acoustic modeling. Computer Methods in Biomechanics and Biomedical Engineering, 2010, 13 (4), pp.443-453. ⟨10.1080/10255842.2010.490528⟩. ⟨halshs-00687176⟩