Vocal Tract Formant Lab

Human vowels get their distinct timbre from resonances of the vocal tract, not from the vocal folds themselves. This simulator models the tract as a chain of cylindrical tube segments — a real multi-tube acoustic transmission-line model — whose cross-sectional area you shape with tongue height, tongue front-back position, lip rounding and overall tract length. A frequency sweep solves the complex input impedance of the chained tube at the glottis, and its resonance peaks are read off directly as the formants F1, F2 and F3 that define vowel identity. Five cardinal-vowel presets snap the tract to textbook articulations, and a live F1/F2 chart shows where your shape lands relative to the classic IPA vowel space.