Subject: American babble request From: "Dr A. Heinrich" <ah540@xxxxxxxx> Date: Fri, 5 Jun 2009 10:11:26 +0100 List-Archive:<http://lists.mcgill.ca/scripts/wa.exe?LIST=AUDITORY>Dear Colleagues, Please excuse the mass mailing. We are writing to ask if any of you know of a source of good-quality recordings of North American, Chinese-accented, or Indian-accented English speech which could be used to make babble. We would also be interested in hearing about suitable material in other accents of English. We are looking to make speech babble by combining up to 12 people reading. (We have an old copy of the babble used in the SPIN test, but the recording quality is poor.) We are looking for high quality recordings (at least 22 kHz SR, good s/n ratio, no extraneous noise,) of individuals reading prose fluently for about 30 minutes or more each. They should preferably read different materials. A book the speaker enjoys would be ideal. Unrelated sentences, as in TIMIT, is not ideal. We would prefer each person's speech to be recorded separately, so we could combine different numbers of talkers. But it could be acceptable for the recordings to be already combined. For North American English, the dialect is not crucial, and a mixture of dialects would be acceptable. However, we would prefer a more homogeneous dialect, e.g. General American or regional dialects from the south, midwest, north east, Canada etc. For Chinese and Indian English, a common native language would be ideal, but not essential. Regional dialect within those and other foreign language(s) is probably not important for current purposes. If anyone could help us out in any way, we would be very grateful. We have already recorded speakers of British English (mostly Southern Standard British English) and made into a 12-talker babble which we would be happy to share in return. We look forward to hearing from you. With best wishes, Antje Heinrich Sarah Hawkins -- Antje Heinrich, PhD Research Associate Department of Linguistics University of Cambridge Sidgwick Avenue Cambridge CB39DA, UK +44 1223 760814