Towards an investigation of speech energetics using ‘AnTon’: an animatronic model of a human tongue and vocal tract

Abstract

Natural human speech contains a large amount of variation which poses difficulties for contemporary applications of speech technology. Following Lindblom's theory of hyper- and hypospeech, variation in speech is governed by a general principle, which is to optimise the ratio of information throughput to the energy invested. Even though such a relation is often implicitly assumed by researchers, it has never been quantified in terms of actual energy consumption. This is due to the difficulty of measuring speech energetics in humans. This paper introduces an animatronic model of the vocal tract – ‘AnTon’ – which has been designed to quantify energy relations in human speech production. Experiments are reported that demonstrate the animatronic tongue's ability to imitate basic human speech gestures.