Abstract: Modeling the vocal fold biomechanical system is relevant for several fields in speech and voice studies, as in voice production, natural speech synthesis, emotion estimation or voice pathology detection. The key stone to good phonation models is the availability of reliable estimates. An indirect method for the estimation of the biomechanical parameters of the voice production model is presented. The availability of previously-normalized voice databases for pathology studies allows the evaluation of the methodology, and the establishment of the distribution profiles of the parameters under study. The paper illustrates the validation process and the descriptive statistics of the biomechanical parameters.
Index Terms: voice production, speech synthesis, speech biomechanics, gender-sensitive parameter-distributions.