Audio Advice

Audio equipment for speech recording

Advice on the selection and purchase of equipment for making good quality speech recordings in the field. Includes advice on the type of recorder, acquisition to computer for analysis, and choice of microphones.

Working with audio and video data on your PC

This page shows you how you can use free tools for sound and video capture and processing on your PC.

How to play sound from a web page

A popular page describing a range of approaches to incorporating sound into your web pages. Covers use of HTML tags, Java and Javascript solutions.

Help with browser plug-ins for audio replay

This page gives some tips for various browsers on how to obtain and configure a plug-in to support embedded audio.

Sound replay in Visual Basic Applications

This page gives some example source code for the replay of sound from within Visual Basic applications using the DirectSound library.

Speech Data

The following are compilations of speech data which are available for researchers and students:

UCL Speaker Database

Comprises high-quality recordings of a range of speech materials (from words to spontaneous speech) for a set of 45 speakers (women, men and children) from a single regional accent group.

SCRIBE

A pilot corpus of spoken British English produced in a collaboration between UCL, Cambridge University and Edinburgh University. Now with samples of phonetically annotated material available for download.

EUROM

A spoken language resource for the EU with comparable speech recordings available in 7 different European languages.

UCL Dysfluency Database

Recordings of 61 speakers who have been studied by the UCL Psychology department speech group as part of their research into stammering

Also available from our Listening Centre

Sounds of the IPA on CD/Cassette/CD-ROM

A demonstration of ALL the sounds on the current IPA Chart on CD, audio cassette or new interactive CD-ROM.

IPA Sounds in a Clinical Context Audio CD

Ear-training material in the context of "non-standard" pronunciations of English words and phrases, on audio CD.

Tapes for practical phonetics study