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Concatenated Acoustic Tube Model of the Vocal Tract

The first step towards a digital model is in representing the tube as a series of $ N$ concatenated tubes of constant cross-sectional areas, as in Figure 1.1(b) (where $ N$=8). The tubes are assumed to be of equal length $ \Delta$; if $ L$ is the total length of the vocal tract, we have $ N\Delta = L$. In the limit as $ \Delta$ becomes small, the shape of the approximation of the series of tubes will converge to that of continuous vocal tract shown in Figure 1.1(a).

Figure 1.1: (a) The vocal tract, modeled as a single one-dimensional acoustic tube of varying cross-sectional area and (b) an eight tube model suitable for discretization.
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Stefan Bilbao 2002-01-22