INTERSPEECH 2013 The organ stop "vox humana" as a model for a vowel synthesiser Fabian Brackhane1, Jürgen Trouvain2 1 Institut für Deutsche Sprache (IDS), Mannheim, Germany 2Computational Linguistics and Phonetics, Saarland University, Saarbrücken, Germany
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[email protected] played not alone but together with the tremulant and the flue Abstract stop "bourdon" or also called "stopped diapason" (see Fig. 1 In mechanical speech synthesis reed pipes were mainly used bottom) of the same pitch. The tremulant changes the pressure for the generation of the voice. The organ stop "vox humana" of the air streaming to the pipes in brief intervals. The so played a central role for this concept. Historical documents produced sound which resembles the vibrato of a human report that the "vox humana" sounded like human vowels. In singing voice has been named "vox humana". Later the name this study tones of four different "voces humanae" were has been transported to the special construction of the reed recorded to investigate the similarity to human vowels. The pipes, however, the knowledge about the etymology has been acoustical and perceptual analysis revealed that some though lost. not all tones show a high similarity to selected vowels. Since the 18th century the name "vox humana" for the organ stop was used as a programmatic title rather than as a technical Index Terms: vowel synthesis, historical instruments term. This new usage caused organ builders as well as 1. Introduction researchers such as Leonhard Euler or Christian Gottlieb Kratzenstein to consider the "vox humana" as the prototype of Many authors of the 18th and 19th century consider the organ speech synthesis.