[Apologies for cross posting]
Hi all,
As a Last Christmas present in the WHAM! series, we have decided to Make It Big and release WHAM!48kHz, a high-fidelity version of the ambient background noise recordings originally used for the WSJ0 Hipster Ambient Mixtures (WHAM!) dataset.
The noise audio was collected by our definitely not Careless Whisper.ai collaborators at various urban locations throughout the San Francisco Bay Area in late 2018. The environments primarily consist of restaurants, cafes, bars, and parks. Audio was recorded using an Apogee Sennheiser binaural microphone (without a dummy head) on a tripod between 1.0 and 1.5 meters off the ground, at a sampling rate of 48 kHz and with 24 bit precision.
Unlike the original WHAM! noise, which was segmented into clips with lengths corresponding to specific WSJ0 utterances, WHAM!48kHz contains approximately 78 hours of raw noise recordings that were only segmented to remove any regions containing intelligible speech.
WHAM! is a joint effort between Mitsubishi Electronics Research Laboratories (MERL) and Whisper.ai.
Jonathan Le Roux <Jonathan.Le-Roux@xxxxxxxxxxxxxx>
Senior Principal Research Scientist, Speech & Audio Senior Team Leader
MERL - Mitsubishi Electric Research Laboratories
201 Broadway, 8th Floor, Cambridge, MA 02139
Tel.: +1-617-621-7547 Fax: +1-617-621-7550