Fall 2013 Physics Colloquium

September 20; PAS 224, 3pm

Brad Story
University of Arizona

The Physics of Vowels and Consonants

Talking is a human activity controlled by the motor system which contracts muscles to produce movement of various anatomical structures. Unlike most human motor activities, however, the goal of talking is to produce a highly-structured sound wave that carries information coded as the vowels and consonants of a language. The human sound production system is comprised of vibratory and turbulence-based sound sources that induce pressure waves that propagate through the airspace of the vocal tract formed by the relative positions of the tongue, jaw, lips, and velum. Precise control of the vocal tract configuration is of critical importance for producing the desired acoustic characteristics of speech. The pattern of acoustic resonances generated by a given vocal tract shape influences vowel and consonant identity, as well as the overall sound quality (timbre). This talk will focus on the acoustic characteristics of the vocal tract that allow it to be globally shaped for vowel production and locally constricted to generate consonants. A computational model of the speech production process will be used to demonstrate samples of simulated speech.