Figure 1: Infant 'babbling' in order to produce coloured shapes within the BabblePlay App

Little research has been conducted to gauge a listener's ability to recognise or identify speakers when presented with samples of singing within the field of Forensic Speech Science.Eight friends and two foil speakers were recorded speaking and singing to investigate the effects of speaker familiarity and singing in speaker identification tasks.The stimuli were used to create a listening test completed by close social network speakers, members of the wider social network, and general lay listeners.The study aimed to explore the impact of familiarity on an individual's ability to recognise speakers when presented with spoken and sung stimuli.The results revealed that the listeners within the close social network were the most successful in the listening test.Overall, listeners performed best when both samples were spoken, however, those in the close social network were less affected by the use of sung samples, and scored higher, compared to those outside the close social network.

Articulatory speech synthesis has the potential to offer more natural sounding synthetic speech than established concatenative or parametric synthesis methods. Time-domain acoustic models are particularly suited to the dynamic nature of the speech signal, and recent work has demonstrated the potential of dynamic vocal tract models that accurately reproduce the vocal tract geometry. This paper presents a dynamic 3D digital waveguide mesh (DWM) vocal tract model, capable of movement to produce diphthongs. The technique is compared to existing dynamic 2D and static 3D DWM models, for both monophthongs and diphthongs. The results indicate that the proposed model provides improved formant accuracy over existing DWM vocal tract models. Furthermore, the computational requirements of the proposed method are significantly lower than those of comparable dynamic simulation techniques. This paper represents another step toward a fully functional articulatory vocal tract model which will lead to more natural speech synthesis systems for use across society.