English Speech Files

Flat
rortiz-20090504
User: speechsubmission
Date: 5/7/2009 10:06 am
Views: 1628
Rating: 1
Speaker Characteristics:

Gender: male;
Age range: adult;
Language: EN;
Pronunciation dialect: New York City and Northern New Jersey.

Recording Information:

Microphone make: Logitech USB;
Microphone type: headset mic;
Audio card make: Maestro 2E ESS1978;
Audio card type: integrated;
Audio Recording Software: Audacity rel 1.3.5-beta;
O/S: GNU/Linux Debian Lenny.

File Info:

File type: WAV;
Sampling rate: 48kHz;
Sample rate format: 16bit;
Number of channels: [1];
Audio Processing: [y/n] (we prefer, but *do not require*, unprocessed audio)
If yes, please describe: [noise filtering|equalization|audio level normalization|...]

Prompts:

cc-1 Well, here's a story for you: Sarah Perry was a veterinary nurse
cc-2 who had been working daily at an old zoo in a deserted district of the territory,
cc-3 so she was very happy to start a new job at a superb private practice
cc-4 in north square near the Duke Street Tower.
cc-5 That area was much nearer for her and more to her liking.
cc-6 Even so, on her first morning, she felt stressed.
cc-7 She ate a bowl of porridge, checked herself in the mirror
cc-8 and washed her face in a hurry. Then she put on a plain yellow dress
cc-9 and a fleece jacket, picked up her kit and headed for work.
cc-10 When she got there, there was a woman with a goose waiting for her.
cc-11 The woman gave Sarah an official letter from the vet.
cc-12 The letter implied that the animal could be suffering from a rare form
cc-13 of foot and mouth disease, which was surprising,
cc-14 because normally you would only expect to see it in a dog or a goat.
cc-15 Sarah was sentimental, so this made her feel sorry for the beautiful bird.
cc-16 Before long, that itchy goose began to strut around the office like a lunatic,
cc-17 which made an unsanitary mess.
cc-18 The goose's owner, Mary Harrison, kept calling, "Comma, Comma,"
cc-19 which Sarah thought was an odd choice for a name.
cc-20 Comma was strong and huge, so it would take some force to trap her,
cc-21 but Sarah had a different idea.
cc-22 First she tried gently stroking the goose's lower back with her palm,
cc-23 then singing a tune to her. Finally, she administered ether.
cc-24 Her efforts were not futile. In no time, the goose began to tire,
cc-25 so Sarah was able to hold onto Comma and give her a relaxing bath.
cc-26 Once Sarah had managed to bathe the goose, she wiped her off with a cloth
cc-27 and laid her on her right side. Then Sarah confirmed the vet's diagnosis.
cc-28 Almost immediately, she remembered an effective treatment
cc-29 that required her to measure out a lot of medicine.
cc-30 Sarah warned that this course of treatment might be expensive -
cc-31 either five or six times the cost of penicillin.
cc-32 I can't imagine paying so much, but Mrs. Harrison - a millionaire lawyer -
cc-33 thought it was a fair price for a cure.
cc-34 Comma Gets a Cure and derivative works may be used freely for any purpose
cc-35 without special permission provided the present sentence
cc-36 and the following copyright notification accompany the passage in print,
cc-37 if reproduced in print, and in audio format in the case of a sound recording:
cc-38 Copyright 2000 Douglas N. Honorof, Jill McCullough & Barbara Somerville.
cc-39 All rights reserved.
rp-1 When the sunlight strikes raindrops in the air,
rp-2 they act as a prism and form a rainbow.
rp-3 The rainbow is a division of white light into many beautiful colors.
rp-4 These take the shape of a long round arch, with its path high above,
rp-5 and its two ends apparently beyond the horizon.
rp-6 There is , according to legend, a boiling pot of gold at one end.
rp-7 People look, but no one ever finds it.
rp-8 When a man looks for something beyond his reach,
rp-9 his friends say he is looking for the pot of gold at the end of the rainbow.
rp-10 Throughout the centuries people have explained the rainbow in various ways.
rp-11 Some have accepted it as a miracle without physical explanation.
rp-12 To the Hebrews it was a token that there would be no more universal floods.
rp-13 The Greeks used to imagine that it was a sign
rp-14 from the gods to foretell war or heavy rain.
rp-15 The Norsemen considered the rainbow as a bridge
rp-16 over which the gods passed from earth to their home in the sky.
rp-17 Others have tried to explain the phenomenon physically.
rp-18 Aristotle thought that the rainbow was caused by
rp-19 reflection of the sun's rays by the rain.
rp-20 Since then physicists have found that it is not reflection,
rp-21 but refraction by the raindrops which causes the rainbows.
rp-22 Many complicated ideas about the rainbow have been formed.
rp-23 The difference in the rainbow depends considerably upon the size of the drops,
rp-24 and the width of the colored band increases as the size of the drops increases.
rp-25 The actual primary rainbow observed is said to be the effect of
rp-26 super-imposition of a number of bows.
rp-27 If the red of the second bow falls upon the green of the first,
rp-28 the result is to give a bow with an abnormally wide yellow band,
rp-29 since red and green light when mixed form yellow.
rp-30 This is a very common type of bow, one showing mainly red and yellow,
rp-31 with little or no green or blue.

License:

Copyright (C) 2009 Richard A. Ortiz

These files are free software; you can redistribute them and/or modify
them under the terms of the GNU General Public License as published by
the Free Software Foundation; either version 3 of the License, or ( at
your option) any later version.

These files are distributed in the hope that they will be useful, but
WITHOUT ANY WARRANTY; without even the implied warranty of
MERCHANTABILITY or FITNESS FOR A PARTICULAR PURPOSE. See the GNU General
Public License for more details.

rortiz-20090504.tgz

--- (Edited on 5/7/2009 10:06 am [GMT-0500] by speechsubmission) ---


Notice: many prompts in "English Speech Files" were adapted from the prompt files contained in the CMU_ARCTIC speech synthesis database, which were in turn derived from out-of-copyright texts from Project Gutenberg, by the FestVox project at the Language Technologies Institute at Carnegie Mellon University.

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