Introduction

The HTIMIT corpus is a re-recording of a subset of the TIMIT corpus through different telephone handsets. The aim was to create a corpus for the study of telephone transducer effects on speech which minimized confounding factors, such as variable telephone channels and background noise. HTIMIT was created by playing 10 TIMIT sentences from 192 male and 192 females through a stereo loudspeaker into different transducers positioned directly in front of the loudspeaker and digitizing the output from the transducers. 10 transducers (telephone handsets) were used. Most of these are not new; handsets with obvious damage were not used, but in order to obtain some diversity with a limited number of handsets, handsets were selected to have variable sound characteristics, transducer designs or, in the case of electrets, different grill designs. Further information about the handsets is provided in the corpus documentation.

Data

The collection procedure is not ideal with respect to realism of sound transduction, but it does allow for the collection of speech from a large number of speakers repeating identical speech on each instance. Furthermore, coupled with the phonetic markings of from the original TIMIT corpus, HTIMIT offers the ability of studying handset transducer effects on speech recognition systems.

To address the realism of the sound transduction in HTIMIT, a second corpus using the same handsets but with live people speaking into the handsets is also available. This corpus is called the Lincoln Laboratory Handset Database (LLHDB).

Updates

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