An experiment in vocal tract length estimation

December 13-15, 2007: Firenze, Italy, ed. by C. Manfredi, ISBN 978 88-8453-673-3 (print) ISBN 978-88-8453-674-7 (online) © Firenze university press, 2007. Abstract: The presentation concerns the estimation of the vocal tract length of a speaker on the base of her formant frequencies and the formant frequencies and known tract length of a reference speaker. The length prediction is founded on a rule inferred from Webster’s equation that describes the propagation of a planar acoustic wave in a loss-less vocal tract. The length prediction experiments have been crosslanguage, cross-gender and cross-corpora. Results show that the relative length prediction error is less than 3%, which is inferior to the error made assuming typical tract lengths of 15 and 17 cm for male and female speakers respectively.