COLLECTION AND ANNOTATION OF A SPEECH/SONG CORPUS FOR RESEARCH INTO HUMAN UTTERANCE CLASSIFICATION

INFORMATION SHEET

This is a brief introduction to the research project. In describes what the research is for and what will happen in the experiments.

I am collecting a corpus, or a group of files, of people using their voice. I want to find out what the differences are between speaking and singing, and I want to find out what the middle-ground between speaking and singing looks like. There are two steps to this corpus collection.

Stage 1 is recording the sounds. I will be asking people like you to speak, or sing, in response to a series of prompts. The prompts are designed to get you to use your voice in the "middle-ground" between speaking and singing. If you’re not sure what this sounds like, you can practice a bit before I record your voice.

Stage 2 is finding out what you think of the sounds. I will call you back when I have collected all the sounds I need, and if you want, you can participate in this second step as well. I will be playing the sounds in the corpus for you, and you are invited to rate the sounds on a scale from speech-ness to song-ness. That way, I am not just going on my own opinion. There are other questions I will be asking as well, and you can look over the question sheet before you start, if you want.

It is important for you to understand that this corpus will be used for research — I will listen to the sounds and I will program a computer to try to identify which sounds are speech and which sounds are singing, and which are somewhere in between.

Other researchers may want to use this corpus so that we are all working from the same set of data and we can all compare our results. Your personal information will in no way be associated with your voice, but if you do not want your voice to be heard by other scientists, please let me know. The samples are short, and for the most part everyone is saying the same thing, but if you are concerned about other scientists hearing your voice, you don’t have to participate.

If you have any questions about the research, please feel free to ask. You may withdraw at any time and your data will be discarded.