Articulatory Synthesis of Speech and Diverse Vocal Sounds via Optimization

Articulatory synthesis seeks to replicate the human voice by modeling the physics of the vocal apparatus, offering interpretable and controllable speech production. However, such methods often require careful hand-tuning to invert acoustic signals to their articulatory parameters. We present VocalTrax, a method which performs this inversion automatically via optimizing an accelerated vocal tract model implementation. Experiments on diverse vocal datasets show significant improvements over existing methods in out-of-domain speech reconstruction, while also revealing persistent challenges in matching natural voice quality.