EUSTACE home page -
Edinburgh University Speech Timing Archive and Corpus of English

EUSTACE is the Edinburgh University Speech Timing Archive and Corpus of English. The EUSTACE corpus comprises 4608 spoken sentences recorded at the department of Theoretical and Applied Linguistics of Edinburgh University. These sentences, spoken by six speakers of British English, were designed to examine a number of durational effects in speech and are controlled for length and phonetic content. Subconstituents of key words in each sentence have been identified by labels in xlabel (ESPS) format and notes have been made about the prosodic realisation of the sentences. It is hoped that these recordings will be useful for phonetics researchers and speech technologists working on synthesis and recognition.

The corpus is free, and licensed for non-commercial use only. Please read the licence agreement before downloading the corpus.

Example sentences are available for playback on the website. The complete archive, available for downloading, includes a structured list of the sentences, the speech recordings and the label files, together with full documentation including details of the experimental design, recording procedure and labelling methodology. Speech waveform files are available in .wav (RIFF) format and .sd (ESPS) format.

Details of the results of the original research, as described in Laurence White's PhD dissertation, English speech timing: a domain and locus approach, are also included on the website, and the full text of the dissertation is available for downloading. The website also features links to a glossary of technical terms used in this dissertation.

Comments and questions are welcome. Please contact Laurence White (laurence.white@newcastle.ac.uk) or Simon King (simon.king@ed.ac.uk).

How to use the EUSTACE site

The primary pages on the EUSTACE site are listed in the Table of Contents below and also shown on the menu bar near the top of each page. The pages may be navigated in order by using the Forward links at the bottom right of each page. Hypertext links to subsidiary pages are shown in block capitals on the primary pages. Other hypertext links in the text of subsequent pages are to glossary entries; these have a back button to return to the referring page.

EUSTACE Table of Contents

• DESIGN: Design of the sentence materials
• EXAMPLES: Example sentences
• SENTENCES: Full set of sentences
• PROCEDURE: Recording and keyword labelling procedure
• RESULTS: Original experimental results
• DISSERTATION: Laurence White's PhD dissertation - English speech timing: a domain and locus approach
• LICENCE: Licence agreement for the use of the downloadable corpus of sentences
• DOWNLOAD: Full set of sentence recordings for downloading
• GLOSSARY: Glossary of technical terms

Acknowledgements

These pages were produced by Laurence White in collaboration with Simon King. Production was supported by a grant from the Moray Endowment Fund of Edinburgh University.

The original research described in these pages was funded by an EPSRC grant to Alice Turk and Steve Isard, who jointly supervised Laurence White's PhD dissertation, English speech timing: a domain and locus approach.

Thanks for advice regarding the construction of the site are due to Mike Bennett. Thanks also to Sarah Davies, Louise Kelly and Andy Pitts.