| A number of studies have suggested that human larynges are most commonly asymmetric, if not throughout an individual's lifetime, then at least at some point after an individual reaches maturity. These laryngeal asymmetries in turn imply certain asymmetries in the mechanical or geometrical properties of the vocal folds. Yet despite these findings, little work has been devoted to determining how laryngeal asymmetries affect laryngeal acoustics. This thesis attempts to improve on this deficiency by studying these asymmetries through vocal fold modeling.;Three studies were performed examining the acoustics of asymmetric vocal fold models. The first and second studied the effects of tension and glottal width asymmetries, respectively, with the goal of attempting to ascertain whether or not the acoustics of asymmetric larynges is significantly different from those of symmetric larynges. In both experiments, it was found that small asymmetries resulted in little to no significant differences, and while larger asymmetries did produce more significant differences, overall the acoustics of larynges can be said to be generally robust to both types of asymmetries, large and small. The third study compared two different vocal fold models, the finite element model used in the first two. |
