Physics-based synthesis of disordered voices

The purpose of this work is the development of a synthesizer of disordered voices, i.e., a generator of sounds that mimic the vocal quality of speakers that suffer from a voice disorder or laryngeal pathology. A physics-based modeling strategy is fol-lowed for physiological fidelity and a direct relation between the physiology and the perception of vocal quality. The synthe-sizer is based on a smooth and asymmetric version of a lumped mucosal wave model of the vocal folds, coupled to a wave-reflexion analog of the vocal tract. In this paper, we report our progress and present results of synthetic voices with vari-ous levels of vocal frequency jitter, additive pulsatile noise at the glottis due to airflow turbulence, and tension imbalance be-tween the left and right vocal folds. Index Terms: voice, voice synthesis, voice disorders, vocal folds 1