A Unified Numerical Simulation of Vowel Production That Comprises Phonation and the Emitted Sound

A unified approach for the numerical simulation of vowels is presented, which accounts for the self-oscillations of the vocal folds including contact, the generation of acoustic waves and their propagation through the vocal tract, and the sound emission outwards the mouth. A monolithic incompressible fluid-structure interaction model is used to simulate the interaction between the glottal jet and the vocal folds, whereas the contact model is addressed by means of a level set application of the Eikonal equation. The coupling with acoustics is done through an acoustic analogy stemming from a simplification of the acoustic perturbation equations. This coupling is one-way in the sense that there is no feedback from the acoustics to the flow and mechanical fields. All the involved equations are solved together at each time step and in a single computational run, using the finite element method (FEM). As an application, the production of vowel [i] has been addressed. Despite the complexity of all physical phenomena to be simulated simultaneously, which requires resorting to massively parallel computing, the formant locations of vowel [i] have been well recovered.