We describe a method for adapting a physical vocal tract model's anatomical and gestural parameters using acoustic information to match a target speaker. Physical vocal tract models are hard to adjust to match a speaker, as doing so requires information which is difficult to capture, such as X-Ray or MRI information. We propose an analysis-bysynthesis approach to adjust the parameters of the VocalTractLab (VTL) physical vocal tract model, optimizing on an acoustic distance objective function.

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... compare our method with one which does not adjust anatomy parameters, just gestural parameters, and find that the proposed method results in a net improvement. We also test our method's ability to recreate a synthetic speaker for which the ground truth parameters are known, and find that the method can reproduce the speaker if parameters pertaining to teeth and lips are fixed.