Synthesizing speech through a tube talker model informed by dynamic MRI-derived vocal tract area functions

The vocal tract encompasses the airspace from the glottis (the space between the vocal folds) to the external lips. This irregular tube filters the glottal sound source, and is modulated by many structures (e.g. the tongue, lips, and velum) to produce speech sounds (e.g. vowels and consonants). In this work, we determine the preliminary feasibility of integrating vocal tract area functions derived from a recently proposed accelerated pseudo-3D dynamic speech MRI scheme to a parametric tube talker model to synthesize speech.