Shinji Maeda
From EMG to Sound Patterns of Vowels : Software
Abstract:With a few exceptions (Kakita, Fijimura & Honda,1985), EMG data are interpreted with reference to the intended output, such as the phonetic description of utterances spoken by speakers. For a more rigorous interpretation, the data should be also analyzed in terms of the displacement of the articulators and the acoustic patterns. In this paper, we describe our attempts to calculate the formant patterns from EMG responses with an intermediate articulatory model (Maeda, 1990). Since the results are rather scant at this early stage, the main purpose of this report is to document how to use the developed software so it can be used by other researchers. However, I shall describe some of results in order to explain how the software can be used effectively and to demonstrate how useful to evaluate the contribution of tongue and lip muscle activity in terms of articulatory positioning and acoustic pattering, thus filling the gaps between the muscular activity and the acoustics.