Among all available speech articulation measurement techniques, 3D MRI allows one to obtain the most detailed and complete reconstruction of the 3D geometry of the vocal tract (apart from Computed Tomography scans, which use potentially harmful radiation), allowing to address a range of new questions in speech research. It can be used to acquire detailed 3D images of the entire vocal tract of static articulations, which the speaker has to sustain for multiple seconds (3D MRI) 1, or alternatively, to acquire the dynamic articulation from the entire mid-sagittal plane of the vocal tract (real-time MRI, with typically more than 30 frames per second 2) or individual organs like the vocal folds 3. Recently, Magnetic Resonance Imaging (MRI) has become an important tool for speech research. According to both the acoustic and perceptual metrics, most models are accurate representations of the intended speech sounds and can be readily used for research and education. The dataset was evaluated in terms of the plausibility and the similarity of the resonance frequencies determined by the acoustic simulations and measurements, and in terms of the human identification rate of the vowels and fricatives synthesized by the artificially excited 3D-printed vocal tract models. The data include the 3D Magnetic Resonance Imaging data of the vocal tracts, the corresponding 3D-printable and finite-element models, and their simulated and measured acoustic and aerodynamic properties. The Dresden Vocal Tract Dataset (DVTD) presented here contains geometric and (aero)acoustic data of the vocal tract of 22 German speech sounds (16 vowels, 5 fricatives, 1 lateral), each from one male and one female speaker. A detailed understanding of how the acoustic patterns of speech sounds are generated by the complex 3D shapes of the vocal tract is a major goal in speech research.
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