Sound Databases in the Study of Phonetic Interference

A sound database is a comfortable means for organizing and storing digitized sound material. Two types of sound databases developed at the Department of Phonetics of St. Petersburg State University make it possible to handle various types of sound material used in phonetic research of the interference between languages. Their structural differences are defined by the differences of the units chosen for storage and description. Databases of the first type (Sound Archives) are designed for big corpora. The description of such storage unit refers to the whole text. The database of the second type (Speech Corpus) is designed for the storage of phonetically balanced material (text). The storage unit in this case is the text, the description units are syllables and phrases.