The Gunnar Fant Legacy in the Study of Vocal Acoustics
Résumé
Gunnar Fant made a number of seminal contributions to the acoustics of human speech and voice production. Early in his career - even before defending his dissertation and being appointed professor - he was already an established researcher of world renown. The main focus of his KTH laboratory was the acoustic analysis and synthesis of speech. The forte of this lab was the successful attempts to synthesize natural sounding speech electronically. The good results were due to the fact that Fant had used his broad understanding of circuits and acoustics to formulate the source-filter theory. This is an account that makes it possible to deduce the physical properties of speech from first principles. Today we know that it gives a highly accurate description of the speech signal and that it explains how vowels and consonants get their acoustic properties. It is general, language-independent and valid for both normal and disordered speech. It can be applied to the human voice in singing as well as in speech. In our presentation we will highlight the key role played by the source-filter theory in theoretical as well as applied work. We will also try to identify still outstanding questions that remain incompletely understood. As examples of such questions issues arising in the quantitative modeling of the front cavity of the vocal tract will be addressed, notably the treatment of spread lips and the sublingual cavity formed under the tongue blade in coronal consonants.
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