Construction and control of a three-dimensional vocal tract model

We present a novel 3D vocal tract model and a method to control the articulatory movements of the model. The vocal tract model consists of 7 wireframe meshes that represent the three dimensional surfaces of the articulators and the vocal tract walls. 23 parameters determine the shape of the meshes. The articulatory movements in terms of the parameter curves are generated from a gestural description of an utterance. The work presented here is an integral part of a complete articulatory speech synthesizer for high quality synthesis.