English Speech Files

Flat
The Rainbow Passage
User: granthulbert
Date: 12/29/2006 2:33 am
Views: 5973
Rating: 22

Speaker Characteristics:

Gender: male
Age range: adult
Pronunciation dialect: California

Recording Information:

Microphone: C-Media USB Headphone Set
Audio Card: Mac USB built-in
Audio Recording Software: Audacity rel 1.2.5
O/S: Mac OS X 10.4.8

File Info:

File type: wav
Sampling rate: 44.1kHz
Sample rate format: 32-bit float
Number of channels: 1

 

Copyright (C) 2006  Grant Hulbert

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 2
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.

 

rp-01 When the sunlight strikes raindrops in the air,
rp-02 they act as a prism and form a rainbow.
rp-03 The rainbow is a division of white light into many beautiful colors.
rp-04 These take the shape of a long round arch, with its path high above,
rp-05 and its two ends apparently beyond the horizon.
rp-06 There is , according to legend, a boiling pot of gold at one end.
rp-07 People look, but no one ever finds it.
rp-08 When a man looks for something beyond his reach,
rp-09 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

--- (Edited on 12/29/2006 2:33 am [GMT-0600] by granthulbert) ---

rp.zip rp.zip

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.

Re: The Rainbow Passage
User: kmaclean
Date: 12/29/2006 10:14 pm
Views: 253
Rating: 23

Thanks Grant,

I'm still working on automating the Acoustic Model build scripts so it will be a few days before I can get to your submissions,

Ken 

 

--- (Edited on 12/29/2006 11:14 pm [GMT-0500] by kmaclean) ---


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.

Re: The Rainbow Passage
User: granthulbert
Date: 12/30/2006 1:00 am
Views: 213
Rating: 22
OK, I'll wait for feedback on the quality of my submissions before uploading any new ones.

--- (Edited on 12/30/2006 1:00 am [GMT-0600] by granthulbert) ---


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.

Re: The Rainbow Passage
User: kmaclean
Date: 1/3/2007 4:33 pm
Views: 277
Rating: 28

Excellent submission, thanks,

It is showing up as 32-bit float,  and I only saw one or two instances of clipping at 0.9/-0.9, but they are ready for committing to Subversion and incorporation into the VoxForge Acoustic Model.

I'll be using your submissions to help build and test the validation of user submissions portion of the automated Acoustic Model build script ... You should see it incorporated in another few days.

thanks for your patience, 

Ken 



--- (Edited on 1/ 3/2007 5:33 pm [GMT-0500] by kmaclean) ---


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.

Re: The Rainbow Passage
User: kmaclean
Date: 1/18/2007 2:27 pm
Views: 656
Rating: 18

Hi Grant,

thanks again for the submissions.

I have incorporated your audio (finally) into the VoxForge Acoustic Models.  We've got a daily job that integrates new audio submissions into the acoustic model.  Just follow this link to try out the most current acoustic model (click the most recent build, and then download the Acoustic Model or Quickstart gzipped tar or zip file).

One thing for future reference, although your README stated that you were using 32-bit float for your audio, the files that you generated were actually 44.1kHz-16bit audio files. 

I'm not sure exactly what happened, but it is likely that you used the 16-bit default under your Audacity preferences for your Uncompressed Export Format.  Audacity is confusing in this regard.  Even though you set your project preferences to 44.1kHz-32bit float, if you are exporting to wav files, you also need to set your Uncompressed Export Format to 32bit float - look at this FAQ entry for more information. 

To make things even more confusing, if you set you project rate to 32bit float, and import audio at 44.1kHz-16bit, Audacity will show 32bit float in the track menu.  This is not the same as upsampling, Audacity is just increasing the 'bit depth' (i.e. the number of bits used to represent a sample) of the samples.  This helps when you are using effects in Audacity, because the higher resolution means that noise due to rounding errors is less pronounced.  However, this also makes it look like your audio is at a higher bits per sample than it really is - which is why I thought some of your audio files were 32 bit float, but were actually at 16 bits per sample.

Ken 

 

--- (Edited on 1/18/2007 3:27 pm [GMT-0500] by kmaclean) ---


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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