Measurement of acoustic and anatomic changes in oral and maxillofacial surgery patients

We describe an arrangement for simultaneous recording of speech and geometry of vocal tract in patients undergoing surgery involving this area. Experimental design is considered from an articulatory phonetic point of view. The speech and noise signals are recorded with an acoustic-electrical arrangement. The vocal tract is simultaneously imaged with MRI. A MATLAB-based system controls the timing of speech recording and MR image acquisition. The speech signals are cleaned from acoustic MRI noise by a non-linear signal processing algorithm. Finally, a vowel data set from pilot experiments is compared with validation data from anechoic chamber as well as with Helmholtz resonances of the vocal tract volume.