A concurrent acoustical model of the human vocal tract

A digital simulation which models certain aspects of the human speech production process is developed from fundamental principles. Specifically the transmission of sound in the vocal tract is modelled as acoustic wave propagation in a time-varying tube with some account taken of the inherent losses. The vocal tract model proposed here has been designed to include various acoustic effects which, though incidental to the intelligibility of synthetic speech, are highly significant in terms of naturalness. A concurrent software version of the model has been developed using the Occam programming language and implemented on T414 Transputers.