UPMC Pierre Voice Data
A French speech corpus designed for synthesis, recorded in 2013 at the Institut des Systèmes Intelligents et de Robotique (ISIR), Université Pierre et Marie Curie (UPMC) by Pierre Chauvin, a male native speaker of French.
Data format
Audio
The audio data is provided in the losslessly compressed FLAC format, which can be played by a myriad of software, including Praat. The speaker was recorded at a 48 kHz sampling rate (prompts 1 through 100 at 44.1 kHz), 16 bits per sample, in mono. No filters of any sort have been applied to this raw data.
Phonetic segmentation
Phonetic labels, automatically obtained using forced alignment using the eHMM tool from Festvox 2.1, are provided as Xwaves .lab files;
each line (after the header) has the fields
[ENDTIME] [NUMBER] [LABEL]
where ENDTIME is in seconds, NUMBER has no significance, and LABEL uses a variant of the SAMPA phonetic alphabet.
(These files can also be opened in Praat using the command Read IntervalTier from Xwaves....)
Downloading the corpus
Git and git-annex
The best way of downloading the data is to use Git. To make the most of the features offered by GitHub, you should fork this repository to your own GitHub account, then use your favorite Git client to clone that repo to your local machine. Please refer to GitHub Help and the Web as required.
Because Git is not designed to efficiently handle large amounts of binary data, specifically the audio files in the corpus, we manage those files using git-annex.
This means that the actual audio files are not stored in this repo, but we nevertheless leverage the benefits of distributed revision control by tracking which Git remotes do have copies of the audio files.
However, git-annex also performs poorly with large numbers of files, so the .flac files have been packaged into tarballs, one per speaking style.
(Use tar or your favorite file archive utility to unpack.)
You will need git-annex to handle this elegantly.
Once you've cloned the repository, you can use the command git annex get audio.tar to get audio.tar, i.e. the tar file containing the audio recordings.
Alternative: Git-less download
If all of that stuff about Git and version control is just too technical, you can still download the corpus in a few simple steps.
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Download the most recent version (the master branch) of this repository as a
.zipfile by clicking on the "Download ZIP" button, or the following URL:https://github.com/marytts/upmc-pierre-data/archive/master.zip
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Download the audio data directly from one of the web remotes, such as
License
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 International License.
See the LICENSE.md file for details.