CMU Arctic Databases for Speech Synthesis

• Main Authors: John Kominek, Alan W Black, Ver Ver
• Other Authors: The Pennsylvania State University CiteSeerX Archives
• Format: Text
• Language: English
• Published: 2003
• Subjects: Arctic
• Online Access: http://citeseerx.ist.psu.edu/viewdoc/summary?doi=10.1.1.64.8827; http://festvox.org/cmu_arctic/cmu_arctic_report.pdf

This report introduces the CMU Arctic databases designed for the purpose of speech synthesis research. These single speaker speech databases have been carefully recorded under studio conditions and consist of nearly 1150 phonetically balanced English utterances. They are distributed as free software, without restriction on commercial or non-commercial use. The Arctic corpus consists of four primary sets of recordings (3 male, 1 female), plus several ancillary databases. Each database is distributed with automatically segmented phonetic labels. These extra files were derived using the standard voice building scripts of the Festvox system. In addition to phonetic labels, the databases provide complete support for the Festival Speech Synthesis System, including pre-built voices that may be used as is. Festival and Festvox are available at