@InProceedings{Birkholz2022_1138,
<br/>   author = {Peter Birkholz and Christian Kosmas Mayer and Patrick Häsner},
<br/>   booktitle = {Studientexte zur Sprachkommunikation: Elektronische Sprachsignalverarbeitung 2022},
<br/>   title = {Towards a soft fluidic elastomer tongue for a mechanical vocal tract},
<br/>   year = {2022},
<br/>   editor = {Oliver Niebuhr and Malin Svensson Lundmark and Heather Weston},
<br/>   month = mar,
<br/>   pages = {24--31},
<br/>   publisher = {TUDpress, Dresden},
<br/>   abstract  = {Most mechanical vocal tract models use rigid-bodied robotic components
to represent soft articulators such as the tongue and the velum. However,
such rigid articulators have limited capabilities to deform realistically during contact
with the vocal tract walls, to generate flow-induced vibrations for trill consonants,
or to dampen the acoustic resonances of the vocal tract. Here we present the
first prototype of a soft fluidic elastomer tongue based on the ideas of soft robotics.
The tongue was designed as a soft silicone structure with three water-filled chambers
for the anterior, middle, and posterior parts of the tongue. The tongue shape is
controlled by the volumes of water in the three chambers. Integrated into a simplified
vocal tract model, we explored the potential of this design to reproduce human
tongue shapes for vowels, and synthesized the corresponding speech sounds using a
vibrating reed source at the glottis. While it was possible to create plausible tongue
shapes for the vowels /a, i, e, E/, the vowels /o/ and /u/ could not be reproduced.
The F1-F2 formant space of the synthesized sounds was considerably smaller than
the human formant space. Consequently, follow-up designs of this type of tongue
would benefit from finite-element simulations to optimize the possible variations
in shape.},
<br/>   isbn = {978-3-95908-548-9},
<br/>   issn = {0940-6832},
<br/>   keywords = {Models},
<br/>   url = {https://www.essv.de/pdf/2022_24_31.pdf},
<br/>}