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Abstract:
The vocal movement isn't only a movement of the vocal organs.
It is also a movement that produces acoustic signals received by
hearing as linguistic information through hydroacoustic phenomena
along with the formation of the vocal way. The purpose of this
research is to develop a talking robot with vocal organs (lungs
and vocal cords), and articulators (tongue, lip, tooth and nasal
cavity) that can simulate human vocal movement. The authors think
that when the technology to conversely estimate the motion of the
mouth from the voice is developed with this research, the authors
can then propose a training method and acquisition of foreign
languages. Therefore, in 1999 the authors developed an
anthropomorphic talking robot, WT-1 (Waseda Talker-1). It
simulates human voice movement, and has articulators (lips
[4-DOF], teeth [1-DOF], a tongue [6-DOF], a nasal cavity and a
soft palate [1-DOF]) and vocal organs (vocal cords [1-DOF], lungs
[1-DOF]); Total DOF is 14. The authors experimented WT-1 on
vowels [49.MPG]. As a result, F1, F2 frequencies of all Japanese
vowels were realized. WT-1's voice wasn't natural, but it could
utter single vowels. The authors showed the way to realize the
natural vowel sound in the human tone. For future works, the
authors aim at the realization of natural vowel and consonant
sounds, and to improve the mechanism of WT-1 and to develop a
control system for continuous speech.
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