Biologically inspired silicon vocal tract

Abstract

Electrical circuit models of biological systems provide an intuitive mechanism for engineers' understanding and are increasingly used to improve the performance of related technology. For example, visual processing performed by the retina can be modeled by a resistive network of interconnected photodetectors and analog processing elements. Complex bio-mechanical systems such as the heart, cochlea, and vocal tract can be modeled using electrical circuits by mapping pressure to voltage, volume velocity to current, and mechanical impedances to electrical impedances, and by representing valves with diodes. Silicon models of the retina1 have been used in machine vision systems and circuit models of the heart have been used to shed light on cardiac and circulatory malfunction in medicine. Silicon cochlea models have led to improved speech recognition in noise2 and low-power cochlear-implant processors for the deaf.