A corpus of audio-visual recordings of linguistically balanced, Danish sentences for speech-in-noise experiments

Abstract

A typical speech-in-noise experiment in a research and development setting can easily contain as many as 20 conditions, or even more, and often requires at least two test points per condition. A sentence test with enough sentences to make this amount of testing possible without repetition does not yet exist in Danish. Thus, a new corpus has been developed to facilitate the creation of a sentence test that is large enough to address this need. The corpus itself is made up of audio and audio-visual recordings of 1200 linguistically balanced sentences, all of which are spoken by two female and two male talkers. The sentences were constructed using a novel, template-based method that facilitated control over both word frequency and sentence structure. The sentences were evaluated linguistically in terms of phonemic distributions, naturalness, and connotation, and thereafter, recorded, postprocessed, and rated on their audio, visual, and pronunciation qualities. This paper describes in detail the methodology employed to create and characterize this corpus.