A comparative study of two-dimensional vocal tract acoustic modeling based on Finite-Difference Time-Domain methods
This work provides a more computationally efficient yet accurate method for vocal tract acoustic modeling, which is significant for researchers and engineers in speech synthesis and analysis, though it represents an incremental improvement.
This paper introduces a 2.5D Finite-Difference Time-Domain (FDTD) method for vocal tract acoustic modeling, which extends the existing 2D FDTD by incorporating tube depth. The new model's acoustic outputs are shown to be comparable to 2D FDTD and 3D FEM models at low spatio-temporal resolution, and a radiation model is developed and analyzed for five vowel sounds.
The two-dimensional (2D) numerical approaches for vocal tract (VT) modelling can afford a better balance between the low computational cost and accurate rendering of acoustic wave propagation. However, they require a high spatio-temporal resolution in the numerical scheme for a precise estimation of acoustic formants at the simulation run-time expense. We have recently proposed a new VT acoustic modelling technique, known as the 2.5D Finite-Difference Time-Domain (2.5D FDTD), which extends the existing 2D FDTD approach by adding tube depth to its acoustic wave solver. In this work, first, the simulated acoustic outputs of our new model are shown to be comparable with the 2D FDTD and a realistic 3D FEM VT model at a low spatio-temporal resolution. Next, a radiation model is developed by including a circular baffle around the VT as head geometry. The transfer functions of the radiation model are analyzed using five different vocal tract shapes for vowel sounds /a/, /e/, /i/, /o/ and /u/.