From corpora-request@lists.uib.no Wed Jun 5 17:41:43 1996 Date: 5 Jun 1996 10:43:30 +0200 From: Antoine Ogonowski Subject: New Release from the LDC Announcing a NEW RELEASE from the LINGUISTIC DATA CONSORTIUM Acoustic-Phonetic Continuous Speech Corpus Far Field Microphone Recordings FFMTIMIT The FFMTIMIT corpus contains the previously-unreleased secondary microphone waveforms for the TIMIT Acoustic-Phonetic Continuous Speech corpus. The primary microphone waveforms, which were recorded using a close-talking noise-cancelling head-mounted Sennheiser microphone (model HMD-414), are available from the LDC on NIST Speech Disc 1-1.1 (LDC93S1). The secondary microphone used in the recording of the TIMIT corpus was a Breul & Kjaer 1/2" free-field microphone (model 4165). While the Sennheiser microphone recordings are relatively "clean" with respect to non-speech noise, the FFMTIMIT recordings includes significant low frequency noise, which was due to the HVAC system and mechanical vibration transmitted through the floor of the double-walled sound booth used in recording. Because it is noiser than its TIMIT counterpart, the data of FFMTIMIT may be used in the development of more noise-robust speech recognition systems. In addition, this data may be of value to researchers involved in vocal tract modeling because the B&K microphone has extremely flat free-field frequency response and calibration tones are provided. Note that the B&K TIMIT data contained with this release has not been processed through any highpass filter, (e.g., the 1581-point filter described in the paper "The DARPA Speech Recognition Research Database" by Fisher, Doddington and Goudie-Marshall in "DARPA TIMIT Acoustic-Phonetic Continuous Speech Corpus CD-ROM," NISTIR 4930 / NTIS Order No. PB93- 173938.) Institutions that have membership in the LDC during the 1996 Membership Year will be able to receive FFMTIMIT at no additional charge, in the same manner as all other text and speech corpora published by the LDC. Nonmembers can receive a copy of FFMTIMIT for research purposes only for a fee of $100. If you would like to order a copy of this corpus, please email your request to ldc@unagi.cis.upenn.edu. If you need additional information before placing your order, or would like to inquire about membership in the LDC, please send email or call (215) 898-0464. Further information about the LDC and its available corpora can be accessed on the Linguistic Data Consortium WWW Home Page at URL http://www.cis.upenn.edu/~ldc. Information is also available via ftp at ftp.cis.upenn.edu under pub/ldc; for ftp access, please use "anonymous" as your login name, and give your email address when asked for password.