Katharina Fuchs and Martin Hagmüller, Institute of Signal Processing and Speech Communication aiming at giving people who have lost their voice a more natural voice.
The removal of the larynx involves the loss of speech. The voice output of most artificial voice generators is usually modelled on male voices. TU Graz is busy researching to develop alternatives. The diagnosis comes as a deep shock for the person. A loss of the larynx, for instance due to cancer, changes a person's everyday life quite fundamentally. The larynx contains not only all the vocal chords, it also acts as a switch point between the oesophagus and the trachea, or windpipe - every time we swallow, it closes the passage to the trachea. While we normally take this function for granted, it does not work any more if you need a "tracheostoma" - an artificial breathing hole into the trachea through the throat - because in this case the pharynx, instead of being connected to the trachea, goes directly into the oesophagus.
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