Influence of lips on the production of vowels based on finite element simulations and experiments

Three-dimensional (3-D) numerical approaches for voice production are currently being investigated and developed. Radiation losses produced when sound waves emanate from the mouth aperture are one of the key aspects to be modeled. When doing so, the lips are usually removed from the vocal tract geometry in order to impose a radiation impedance on a closed cross-section, which speeds up the numerical simulations compared to free-field radiation solutions. However, lips may play a significant role. In this work, the lips' effects on vowel sounds are investigated by using 3-D vocal tract geometries generated from magnetic resonance imaging. To this aim, two configurations for the vocal tract exit are considered: with lips and without lips. The acoustic behavior of each is analyzed and compared by means of time-domain finite element simulations that allow free-field wave propagation and experiments performed using 3-D-printed mechanical replicas. The results show that the lips should be included in order to correctly model vocal tract acoustics not only at high frequencies, as commonly accepted, but also in the low frequency range below 4 kHz, where plane wave propagation occurs.