PhD Position F/M Construction of a Generic Multilingual, Multi-Speaker Articulatory Model Using Real-Time MRI Data (PhD offer)

Contexte et atouts du poste

Background\n\n

Speech production requires control of the movements of the articulators (jaw, tongue, lips, etc.) that are used to modify the shape of the vocal tract, and consequently the acoustic properties, including the resonance frequencies of the vocal tract.\n\n

When learning to speak or acquiring a second language, speakers learn to move and control their articulators to produce the sounds of their language. Articulatory synthesis mimics this process by using the temporal evolution of the vocal tract shape and source parameters as input. The advantage of articulatory synthesis is that it can explain the articulatory origin of phonetic contrasts, manipulate the movement of articulators (or even block one to simulate a speech impairment), adapt to a new speaker by modifying the size and shape of the articulators, and finally, reconstruct the vocal tract shape from the speech signal.\n\n

Compared to other synthesis approaches that offer high quality, the main advantage of articulatory synthesis is therefore its ability to control the entire speech production process.\n\n

Generating the geometric shape of the vocal tract at every moment of synthesis is the central focus of articulatory synthesis. It most often relies on the use of an articulatory model [1, 2] that determines the shape of the vocal tract using a small number of parameters. This model is almost exclusively constructed either from geometric primitives or from a small number of MRI images of a single speaker and, consequently, for a single language. Recently, we developed a model that uses a large number of dynamic MRI images of a speaker to generate the shape of the vocal tract based on a sequence of phonemes to be articulated [3].\n\n

The objective of this thesis is now to construct a generic model that is independent of the speaker and the language.

Mission confiée

Work