Vocal-Tract Acoustics, Aerodynamics, and Overlap-and-Add Synthesis in DYNARTmo

Bernd J. Kröger

This paper presents the acoustic and aerodynamic extension of DYNARTmo, a dynamic articulatory model for visualizing and synthesizing speech production. Gestural control trajectories determine vocal-tract geometry, which is converted into an acoustic tube with nasal branching and effective lateral passages. A lumped aerodynamic network relates prescribed glottal motion and pulmonary pressure to airflow and supraglottal pressure storage. Phonatory excitation, oral friction, and glottal aspiration are synthesized as separate contributions. Frame-specific acoustic responses are combined by overlap-and-add, preserving response tails beyond individual control frames. Three German words, ``Tasse'', ``Muse'', and ``Lade'', illustrate the coordination of articulation, pressure, flow, and acoustic sources across vowels, nasals, laterals, fricatives, and plosives. The implementation has been optimized by the author primarily for sound recognizability; independent perceptual evaluation remains outstanding, and fricative-noise naturalness requires further refinement. The model provides an inspectable, articulatorily controlled production plant for future neural simulations of babbling,…