3D printable vocal tract tube models

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Title
3D printable vocal tract tube models
Abstract
The Vowel by Chiba and Kajiyama (1941-42) integrated the mechanisms of vowel production and perception from the viewpoints of physiology, physics and psychology in a single book. In a section of this book, the authors conducted an experiment where they made physical models of the human vocal tract based on their measurements and produced vowels from those models. As a result, they confirmed that the artificially produced vowels from the models had similar characteristics as those produced by human being had. Arai (2001) replicated the physical models in The Vowel at the 60th anniversary of its publication. In 2009, the replicas (Model VTM-C10) were reborn as VTM-N20; and furthermore, we have released the VTM-T20 family, of which the configurations are much simpler and the sound quality are better. The VTM family, including VTM-N20 and VTM-T20 have already started to being used by many people and help them to intuitively understand the mechanisms of vowel production (Arai, 2007, 2012, 2016). The Phonetic Society of Japan celebrated its 90th anniversary in 2016, and we focused again spotlight on the achievements by Chiba and Kajiyama (Arai, 2017). Then, in 2017, files of VTM-N20 and VTM-T20 for 3D printing became available through this website.
Citation
Arai, T. (n.d.). 3D printable vocal tract tube models. https://splab.net/apd/v100/
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