Joint optimization of anatomical and gestural parameters in a physical vocal tract model

We describe a method for adapting a physical vocal tract model´s anatomical and gestural parameters using acoustic information to match a target speaker. Physical vocal tract models are hard to adjust to match a speaker, as doing so requires information which is difficult to capture, such as X-Ray or MRI information. We propose an analysis-by-synthesis approach to adjust the parameters of the VocalTractLab (VTL) physical vocal tract model, optimizing on an acoustic distance objective function. We compare our method with one which does not adjust anatomy parameters, just gestural parameters, and find that the proposed method results in a net improvement. We also test our method´s ability to recreate a synthetic speaker for which the ground truth parameters are known, and find that the method can reproduce the speaker if parameters pertaining to teeth and lips are fixed.