In the Neck of Time

Numerous studies over the past decade have investigated to making human animation as realistic as possible, especially facial animation. Let’s consider facial animation for human speech. Animating a face, to match up to a speech, requires a lot of effort. Most of the process has now been automated to make it easier for the artist to create facial animation along with lip sync based on a speech provided by the user. While these systems concentrate on the mouth and tongue, where articulation of speech takes place, very little effort has gone to understand and to recreate the exact motion of the neck during speech. The neck plays an important role in voice production and hence it is essential to study the motion created by it.  The purpose of this research is to study the motion of the neck during speech. This research makes two contributions. First, predicting the motion of the neck around the strap muscles for a given speech. This is achieved by training a program with position data of marker placed on the neck along with its speech analysis data. Second, understanding the basic neck motion during speech. This will help an artist understand how the neck should be animated during speech.