Numerical Simulation of Air Flow through Glottis during Very Weak Whisper Sound Production

Makoto OTANI  Tatsuya HIRAHARA 

Publication
IEICE TRANSACTIONS on Fundamentals of Electronics, Communications and Computer Sciences  Vol.E94-A  No.9  pp.1779-1785
Publication Date: 2011/09/01
Online ISSN: 1745-1337
Print ISSN: 0916-8508
Type of Manuscript: PAPER
Category: Speech and Hearing
Keyword: 
non-audible murmur,  whispered voice,  whispered voice production mechanism,  computational fluid dynamics,  air flow through glottis, 

Full Text: PDF

Summary: 
A non-audible murmur (NAM), a very weak whisper sound produced without vocal fold vibration, has been researched in the development of a silent-speech communication tool for functional speech disorders as well as human-to-human/machine interfaces with inaudible voice input. The NAM can be detected using a specially designed microphone, called a NAM microphone, attached to the neck. However, the detected NAM signal has a low signal-to-noise ratio and severely suppressed high-frequency component. To improve NAM clarity, the mechanism of a NAM production must be clarified. In this work, an air flow through a glottis in the vocal tract was numerically simulated using computational fluid dynamics and vocal tract shape models that are obtained by a magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) scan for whispered voice production with various strengths, i.e. strong, weak, and very weak. For a very weak whispering during the MRI scan, subjects were trained, just before the scanning, to produce the very weak whispered voice, or the NAM. The numerical results show that a weak vorticity flow occurs in the supraglottal region even during a very weak whisper production; such vorticity flow provide aeroacoustic sources for a very weak whispering, i.e. NAM, as in an ordinary whispering.