Mapping Thyroarytenoid and Cricothyroid Activations to Postural and Acoustic Features in a Fiber-Gel Model of the Vocal Folds

Any specific vowel sound that humans produce can be represented in terms of four perceptual features in addition to the vowel category. They are pitch, loudness, brightness, and roughness. Corresponding acoustic features chosen here are fundamental frequency (f(o)), sound pressure level (SPL), normalized spectral centroid (NSC), and approximate entropy (ApEn). In this study, thyroarytenoid (TA) and cricothyroid (CT) activations were varied computationally to study their relationship with these four specific acoustic features. Additionally, postural and material property variables such as vocal fold length (L) and fiber stress (σ) in the three vocal fold tissue layers were also calculated. A fiber-gel finite element model developed at National Center for Voice and Speech was used for this purpose. Muscle activation plots were generated to obtain the dependency of postural and acoustic features on TA and CT muscle activations. These relationships were compared against data obtained from previous in vivo human larynx studies and from canine laryngeal studies. General trends are that f(o) and SPL increase with CT activation, while NSC decreases when CT activation is raised above 20%. With TA activation, acoustic features have no uniform trends, except SPL increases uniformly with TA if there is a co-variation with CT activation. Trends for postural variables and material properties are also discussed in terms of activation levels.