Abstract
This paper describes data-glove-driven vocal tract configuration methods. Unlike direct mapping from hand gestures to sounds using a data glove, intuitive manipulation of the data glove was applied to configure the vocal tract shape. Two manipulation methods were proposed and then evaluated in terms of the vocal tract area function, resulting formant frequencies and ease of manipulation. It was revealed that although both methods were capable of producing the resulting formant frequencies with reasonable accuracy for steady vowel production, the method with three fingers enabled users to easily configure the vocal tract shape. Moreover, the effect of training in manipulating the data glove to configure the vocal tract shape for continuous vowels was evaluated in terms of their sound spectrograms and the distribution of the resulting formant frequencies. An experiment to evaluate the effectiveness of training proved that beginners were able to produce continuous vowels within about three training sessions.
