Dataset of British English speech recordings for psychoacoustics and speech processing research

Cox, Trevor John; Graetzer, Simone; Akeroyd, Michael A; Barker, Jonathan; Culling, John; Naylor, Graham; Porter, Eszter; Muñoz, Rhoddy Viveros

Abstract

The Clarity Speech Corpus is a forty speaker British English speech dataset. The corpus was created for the purpose of running listening tests to gauge speech intelligibility and quality in the Clarity Project, which has the goal of advancing speech signal processing by hearing aids through a series of challenges. The dataset is suitable for machine learning and other uses in speech and hearing technology, acoustics and psychoacoustics. The data comprises recordings of approximately 10,000 sentences drawn from the British National Corpus (BNC) with suitable length, words and grammatical construction for speech intelligibility testing. The collection process involved the selection of a subset of BNC sentences, the recording of these produced by 40 British English speakers, and the processing of these recordings to create individual sentence recordings with associated prompts and metadata.

clarity_utterances.v1_2.tar.gz contains all the recordings as .wav files, with the accompanying metadata such as text prompts in clarity_master.json. Further details are given in the readme.

Sample_clarity_utterances.zip contains a sample of 10.

Please reference the following data paper, which has details on how the corpus was generated: Graetzer, S., Akeroyd, M.A., Barker, J., Cox, T.J., Culling, J.F., Naylor, G., Porter, E. and Muñoz, R.V., 2022. Dataset of British English speech recordings for psychoacoustics and speech processing research: the Clarity Speech Corpus. Data in Brief, p.107951.

• Online Publication Date: Nov 24, 2021
• Publication Date: Nov 24, 2021
• Deposit Date: Feb 3, 2025
• DOI: https://doi.org/10.17866/rd.salford.16918180.v3
• Publisher URL: https://salford.figshare.com/articles/dataset/Dataset_of_British_English_speech_recordings_for_psychoacoustics_and_speech_processing_research/16918180
• Collection Date: Nov 24, 2021