Vocal tract acoustics: Gunnar Fant's legacy
Résumé
With more than sixty years of his life devoted to speech research, Gunnar Fant has been at the same time a pioneer in the domain of vocal tract acoustics in the fifties, and a reference to many of those working in various speech domains up to the beginning of the twenty-first century. The contribution will present several faces of Fants work on vocal tract acoustics, and will focus in particular on the aspects of four-tube, three parameter-models and nomograms, of formants cavities affiliations, and of non-uniform vowel normalization. It will then describe some subsequent work based on this heritage, in particular fricatives and nasals acoustic and articulatory modelling, formant convergence for focal vowels in relation with the Dispersion-Focalisation Theory, and use of constrained models for the acoustic-to-articulatory inversion.