Ever wondered how your mouth moves to make different sounds? Try this strange voice simulator to find out

Home / Miscellaneous / Ever wondered how your mouth moves to make different sounds? Try this strange voice simulator to find out
  • The ‘Pink Trombone’ app lets users manually change the shape of the mouth
  • Moving the lips, tongue and oral cavity creates different sounds
  • It simulates the physical form and movements of the human vocal tract

Ever wondered how you made your first word? This nifty app could show you how.

An odd dismembered mouth called ‘Pink Trombone’ lets you find out how certain physical processes in our mouths produce different sounds.

Users can use their fingers, or their mouse, to manually change the shape of the mouth and find out what sounds are produced.

Users can move this disembodied mouth to create different sounds. It was created by Neil Thapen, a researcher in the Czech Republic, who started working on it when his baby daughter was learning to speak

Users can move this disembodied mouth to create different sounds. It was created by Neil Thapen, a researcher in the Czech Republic, who started working on it when his baby daughter was learning to speak

HOW TO WORK IT

Move the tongue to shape vowels.

Make the oral cavity narrower to create fricative consonants.

Close the oral cavity to create stop consonants.

Touch the nasal cavity to let sound flow through the nose.

The disembodied mouth was created by Neil Thapen, a researcher at the Institute of Mathematics of the Academy of Sciences of the Czech Republic.

The ‘Pink Trombone’ app allows users to change the shape of lips, tongue oral and nasal cavity in order to produce different sounds at different pitches.

‘Pink Trombone is an interactive articulatory speech synthesizer,’ Dr Thapen, who has been working on app since 2015, told Digital Trends.

‘That is, it creates speech by modeling — in a simplified way — the physical form and movements of the human vocal tract.

VIRTUAL VIRTUOSO

Pink Trombone shows how your mouth changes shape to produce different sounds.

It recreates the physical form and movements of a vocal tract.

You can move the mouth around in real time with your fingers.

Changing the shape of the lips, tongue and oral cavity produces different sounds at various pitches.

Users can create a variety of sounds, from shrill screams to low rumble.

‘Programs like this have been around for a long time, but the examples I’ve seen from academia tend to have unfriendly interfaces’, he said.

By moving different parts of the mouth, users can create a variety of sounds, from shrill screams to low rumbles.

‘I have tried to make one that is fun to use.

‘You can move the tongue or lips around in real time with your fingers, and see what sound comes out’, said Dr Thapen.

Sound is generated from the glottis – which is part of the larynx.

The sound is filtered by the shape of the vocal tract. The voicebox controls pitch.

By moving the body of the tongue users can create vowels and changing the oral cavity creates consonants, according to the Pink Trombone website.

Moving the tongue produces vowels while moving the oral cavity helps produce consonantsThe sound is filtered by the shape of the vocal tract and the voicebox controls pitch

By moving different parts of the mouth, users can create a variety of sounds, from shrill screams to low rumbles. Sound is generated from the glottis – which is part of the larynx

‘I started working on it when my daughter began to speak,’ he continued.

‘I was reading about the physical processes involved in speech production and thought it would be interesting to implement them on the computer at the same time as she was doing it in real life’, he said.

‘Of course, she ended up learning much faster than I did.’