DFKI SEMAINE Data

Speech databases for the British English TTS voices in the SEMAINE project.

Subsets

There are four speakers, each acting out a character in a specific expressive speaking style.

Female	Male
Poppy is outgoing and optimistic	Obadiah is gloomy and depressed
Duration 1h46m49s	Duration 2h03m53s
Prudence is pragmatic and practical	Spike is angry and argumentative
Duration 3h45m47s	Duration 2h14m05s

Format

The audio data is provided in a single FLAC file per subset, recorded at 44.1 kHz sampling frequency with 16 bit per sample.

The textual data is provided in a single YAML file per subset. These files are a list of utterances, each of which contains

• a prompt code (file basename),
• the utterance text,
• a date timestamp (when the recording was created, in ISO 8601 format),
• utterance start and end times (in seconds) in the FLAC file,
• optionally, the phonetic segments, each of which has
  • a label (based on SAMPA, _ denotes silence), and
  • its duration (in seconds)

For example,

- prompt: uni56
  text: Yes.
  date: 2009-06-12T09:59:34Z
  start: 7961.79
  end: 7964.07
  segments:
  - lab: _
    dur: 0.99
  - lab: j
    dur: 0.08134
  - lab: E
    dur: 0.12866
  - lab: s
    dur: 0.265
  - lab: _
    dur: 1.67

Downloading the data

Use the links on the releases page, or run the downloadAudio task (see below).

Converting the data

For convenience, the utterances for each subset can be be extracted from the YAML and FLAC files using simple commands to run Gradle tasks. After cloning or downloading and unpacking this repository, run ./gradlew tasks (or gradlew tasks on Windows) for details.

Prerequisites

You will need Java to run the tasks. Extracting the utterances to WAV files also requires sox to be installed.

Copyright and license

Copyright 2009 DFKI GmbH.

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International License.