IberSPEECH’2018 is currently being held in Barcelona. The GTM is part of the organizing committee, and our expert in speech synthesis, Francesc Alías is one of the conference co-chairs. PhD student Marc Freixes is presenting a very interesting contribution on voice production through numerical simulation, in which a vowel is obtained when the vocal folds vibrate, generating an acoustic wave that travels through the vocal tract until reaching the lips. In order to reproduce the vowel on a computer, Freixes and other team members of the GTM (see previous link) compute the equations that describe the wave propagation in a 3D model of the vocal tract obtained from medical images. However, the resulting vowel will also depend on the vocal folds, if they produce a more tense or relaxed phonation. The work analyses the influence of tense, modal (neutral) and lax phonation on the production of the vowel [A].

Freixes, M., Arnela, M., Socoró, J. C., Alías, F & Guasch, O. (2018). Influence of tense, modal and lax phonation on the three-dimensional finite element synthesis of vowel [A]. IberSPEECH'2018 

This research has been supported by the Agencia Estatal de Investigación (AEI) and FEDER, EU, through project GENIOVOX TEC2016-81107-P and the support from the Obra Social “La Caixa" under grant ref. 2018- URL-IR1rQ-021.