Estimation of articulatory movement and its application to speech synthesis

In this paper, two methods are investigated to estimate the movement of the vocal tract modeled by a three‐dimensional articulator described by seven physical parameters. First, we use the cubic spline method to interpolate the articulatory parameters between consecutive phonemes. Second, the articulatory parameters are piecewise linearly interpolated and then passed by a cubic spline smoothing filter. The cubic spline smoothing filter is a low‐pass filter with the maximum flatness property. The filter bandwidth can be easily adjusted by a control parameter. A graphical animation is built to visualize the articulatory movement of phonetic strings and to compare the results from the two different schemes. Some English phonemes are synthesized based on the articulatory model and the governing Webster equation in frequency domain considering viscous losses. An overlap‐and‐add method is used to convert the frequency domain spectrum to time domain speech signal. Finally, some example of the synthesized speech phonemes will be demonstrated. [We want to thank the National Science Foundation (NSF) for the support of our work.]