New method for measuring anti-resonance details of the vocal tract transmission characteristics - an experimental study of acoustic tubes

Abstract

A new method is proposed for acoustical measurement and analysis of anti-resonance characteristics of the vocal tract. This method evaluates details of vocal tract transfer function by measuring input and output pressures for a series of vocal tract segments from a selected point within the tract to the radiation end. Theoretical and experimental studies were conducted on acoustic tubes of known geometry in order to assess the accuracy of this method. Experimental results of the acoustic tubes were in agreement with their numerical values with about 2% error for the anti-resonance frequencies, and 4% error for the resonance frequencies. This method was proven to be capable of detecting the location of anti-resonators. In this study, sweeptone signal and glottal sound source were employed as the excitation sources. The two types of excitation sources showed no significant difference in the resonance and anti-resonance frequencies. It is suggested that the method is applicable for detail estimation of vocal tract transmission characteristics from short-period data of natural utterances.