Articulatory Synthesis of Speech and Diverse Vocal Sounds via Optimization

Luke Mo, Manuel Cherep, Nikhil Singh, Quinn Langford, Patricia Maes

Keywords: speech, voice, synthesis, articulatory

Abstract: Articulatory synthesis seeks to replicate the human voice by modeling the physics of the vocal apparatus, offering interpretable and controllable speech production. However, such methods often require careful hand-tuning to invert acoustic signals to their articulatory parameters. We present VocalTrax, a method which performs this inversion automatically via optimizing an accelerated vocal tract model implementation. Experiments on diverse vocal datasets show significant improvements over existing methods in out-of-domain speech reconstruction, while also revealing persistent challenges in matching natural voice quality.

Submission Number: 42