The utterances were collected automatically over the telephone network by recording directly from a T1 connection in 8 kHz, 8-bit mu-law format. The participants, roughly equal numbers of males and females, were solicited by a marketing firm from all regions of the United States. They ranged in age from the teens to the seventies and represented a broad range of educations and incomes as well. Each recorded utterance is accompanied by an orthographic transcription which also notes any unusual acoustic events or anomalies. Macrophone is the American English contribution to an international database of telephone speech corpora called POLYPHONE. Similar data sets are expected for major languages of the world and at least some of these will be made available through LDC. Prospects are currently good for American Spanish (by early 1995), Dutch, Standard French, Standard German, Japanese, Mandarin Chinese, Swiss French and Danish versions of POLYPHONE, all with basically the same structure and methods of collection.

MACROPHONE was collected at SRI under LDC sponsorship. A paper describing it was presented at ICASSP-94: "Macrophone: An American English Telephone Speech Corpus for the POLYPHONE Project," by Jared Bernstein, Kelsey Taussig and Jack Godfrey.

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