A mathematical model of the vowel space
This addresses a limitation in studying speech production for researchers in phonetics and speech synthesis, but it appears incremental as it builds on existing models.
The authors tackled the problem of the many-to-one, nonlinear articulatory-acoustic relationship in speech production by proposing a simplification that establishes a bijection between the vowel space and parametric vocal tract models, resulting in a coordination function that works with different models like Fant's and the 4-Tube DRM.
The articulatory-acoustic relationship is many-to-one and non linear and this is a great limitation for studying speech production. A simplification is proposed to set a bijection between the vowel space (f1, f2) and the parametric space of different vocal tract models. The generic area function model is based on mixtures of cosines allowing the generation of main vowels with two formulas. Then the mixture function is transformed into a coordination function able to deal with articulatory parameters. This is shown that the coordination function acts similarly with the Fant's model and with the 4-Tube DRM derived from the generic model.