Today, the prevention and treatment of voice disorders is an ever-increasing health concern. Since many occupations rely on verbal communication, vocal health is necessary just to maintain one’s livelihood. Commonly applied models to study vocal fold vibrations and air flow distributions are self sustained physical models of the larynx composed of artificial silicone vocal folds. Choosing appropriate mechanical parameters for these vocal fold models while considering simplifications due to manufacturing restrictions is difficult but crucial for achieving realistic behavior. In the present work, a combination of experimental and numerical approaches to compute material parameters for synthetic vocal fold models is presented. The material parameters are derived from deformation behaviors of excised human larynges. The resulting deformations are used as reference displacements for a tracking functional to be optimized. Material optimization was applied to three-dimensional vocal fold models based on isotropic and transverse-isotropic material laws, considering both a layered model with homogeneous material properties on each layer and an inhomogeneous model. The best results exhibited a transversal-isotropic inhomogeneous (i.e., not producible) model. For the homogeneous model (three layers), the transversal-isotropic material parameters were also computed for each layer yielding deformations similar to the measured human vocal fold deformations.
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