Abstract:

Efforts underway at the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory to use newly designed micropower impulse radars (MIR) to measure in real time the excitation function of the vocal tract will be presented. Studies undertaken in collaboration with the University of California at Davis and the University of Iowa with high-speed laryngoscopic cameras, electroglottographs, flow masks, and subglottal pressure transducers have solidified the relationship between the signal returned by the MIR and the voiced excitation function of the vocal tract. As a result, for the first time a transfer function of the vocal tract can be calculated in real time and with unprecedented clarity for voiced speech. This new capability could have significant implications for improvements in speech recognition and speech synthesis processing.