There have been considerable research efforts in the area of vocal tract modeling, but there is still a very small body of information regarding direct 3D measurements of the vocal tract shape. The purpose of this study was to acquire, using MRI, an inventory of 3D vocal tract airway shapes that correspond to a particular set of vowels and consonants. The 3D shapes were analyzed to find the cross-sectional areas along the centerline extending from the glottis to the mouth to produce an 'area function'. These area functions were then used as input to a computer model of 1D acoustic wave propagation in the vocal tract. The final result was a simulation of the speech waveform radiated from the mouth and closely similar to the speech waveform recorded from the same subject.
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