Analysis of flow-structure coupling in a mechanical model of the vocal folds and the subglottal system

An analysis is made of the nonlinear interactions between flow in the subglottal vocal tract and glottis, sound waves in the subglottal system and a mechanical model of the vocal folds. The mean flow through the system is produced by a nominally steady contraction of the lungs, and mechanical experiments frequently involve a ‘lung cavity’ coupled to an experimental subglottal tube of arbitrary or ill-defined effective length L, on the basis that the actual value of L has little or no influence on excitation of the vocal folds. A simple, self-exciting single-mass mathematical model of the vocal folds is used to investigate the sound generated within the subglottal domain and the unsteady volume flux from the glottis for experiments where it is required to suppress feedback of sound from the supraglottal vocal tract. In experiments where the assumed absorption of sound within the sponge-like interior of the lungs is small, the influence of changes in L can be very significant: when the subglottal tube behaves as an open-ended resonator (when L is as large as half the acoustic wavelength) there is predicted to be a mild increase in volume flux magnitude and a small change in waveform. However, the strong appearance of second harmonics of the acoustic field is predicted at intermediate lengths, when L is roughly one quarter of the acoustic wavelength. In cases of large lung damping, however, only modest changes in the volume flux are predicted to occur with variations in L.