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Gunnar Fant developed acoustic models connecting the physical production of speech to its measurable signal. His Acoustic Theory of Speech Production by Gunnar Fant relates vocal-tract geometry to acoustic behavior, including calculations based on X-ray studies of articulations. The original book dates to 1960; the inspected publisher preview is its 1970 second printing.^[ref]

His source-filter model of speech production separates excitation from the filtering of the vocal tract. Changing a filter's resonances can move formants without requiring the same change in the fundamental frequency of the source. This makes speech synthesis an experimental tool: a researcher can vary model parameters and compare the generated signal with recorded speech. KTH's account explicitly describes his synthesis work as a means of testing production hypotheses.^[ref]

KTH's curriculum vitae records 1919–2009 and his leadership of the Speech Transmission Laboratory from 1951 to 1966.^[ref]

The source-filter model of speech production represents a speech sound as an acoustic source shaped by a filter describing the vocal tract. During voiced speech, vibration of the vocal folds supplies a roughly periodic source; constrictions can also generate noise. The tract's resonances emphasize particular frequency regions called formants.^[ref]

Paul Boersma credits Gunnar Fant's 1960 account as the theoretical basis of this construction.^[ref]

In a simplified linear model, output spectrum $Y(f)$ is $S(f)H(f)$, where $S$ describes the source and $H$ the tract's transfer function. Keeping the source fixed while changing the filter can change vowel quality without changing the source's fundamental repetition rate. The Praat tutorial makes this test concrete by constructing a source signal and a formant filter separately, then combining them. The model's separation is an approximation; real sources and tracts can interact.^[ref]

Speech synthesis generates an artificial speech signal from a specified representation. Text-to-speech starts from writing, while a research synthesizer can instead take a phonetic specification or directly controlled acoustic parameters. The distinction separates the input representation from the mechanism producing the sound.

In a source-filter model of speech production, a researcher can set an excitation's fundamental frequency and independently adjust the filter's formants. Holding the first parameter fixed while moving a formant tests whether listeners' responses depend on the spectral change rather than a change in voice pitch. Gunnar Fant's work at KTH used synthesis to test hypotheses about speech production.^[ref] Generated stimuli permit controlled comparisons in speech perception, but intelligibility and similarity to a natural speaker are different outcomes. Recording the parameter settings makes a synthesis experiment reproducible.