Speech production reduces to lungs as compressor driving a glottal oscillator through resonating tracts

Evidence

Figure 5.9 illustrates an ‘engineering-oriented’ mechanical–acoustic model of speech production. The lungs are seen as a ‘pressure compressor’ that is the driving force for the glottal mass–spring oscillator or for frication and transient generation in vocal tract constrictions. The vocal and nasal tracts form an acoustic resonator or filter system, a kind of complex modulator or encoder of speech sounds. From the lips and the nostrils the signal may radiate and propagate to a listener or a microphone in a technical speech communication system. — Ville Pulkki, Matti Karjalainen, Communication Acoustics- An…, 598

Categorization

• DEFINE: The engineering analogy — pressure compressor, mass-spring oscillator, resonator/filter — is the standard mental model for how speech is made.
• XREF: connects to: Lip and vocal fold vibration is driven by Bernoulli pressure reduction from airflow — David M. Howard, Jamie Angus, Acoustics and Psychoacoustics, 1240