Section: Software and Platforms

VisArtico

VisArtico is intended to visualize articulatory data acquired using an articulograph  [97] . It is intended for researchers that need to visualize data acquired from the articulograph with no excessive processing. It is well adapted to the data acquired using the AG500 and AG501 (developed by Carstens Medizinelektronik GmbH), and the articulograph NDI Wave, developed by Northern Digital Inc.

The software allows displaying the positions of the sensors that are simultaneously animated with the speech signal. It is possible to display the tongue contour and the lips contour. The software helps to find the midsagittal plane of the speaker and find the palate contour. In addition, VisArtico allows labeling phonetically the articulatory data.

All this information is very useful to researchers working in the field of speech production, as phoneticians for instance. VisArtico provides several possible views: (1) temporal view, (2) 3D spatial view and (3) 2D midsagittal view. In the temporal view, it is possible to display different articulatory trajectories in addition to the acoustic signal and eventually labels. The midsagittal view can display the tongue contour, the jaw, the lips and the palate.

VisArtico provides several tools to help to improve the quality of interpreting the data. It is a cross-platform software as it is developed in JAVA and does not need any additional external library or framework. It was tested and worked on Windows, Mac OS, and Linux. It should work on any system having JAVA installed. VisArtico is freely distributed via a dedicated website http://visartico.loria.fr .