Starting in 1996, Alexa Internet has been donating their crawl data to the Internet Archive. Flowing in every day, these data are added to the Wayback Machine after an embargo period.
Crawl EE from Alexa Internet. This data is currently not publicly accessible.
TIMESTAMPS
The Wayback Machine - https://web.archive.org/web/20050924090853/http://alt-usage-english.org:80/audio_archive.shtml
The Audio Archive
Sound samples are spoken by English speakers from around the world. The spoken texts have been chosen for their usefulness in accent determination. On this page:
The sound samples on this page are available in MP3 and WAV format. The MP3 files are recommended because they are much smaller, so they download more quickly and are more economical with Internet resources. Also a few users have found that the WAV files sound garbled on their PCs. To enable MP3 in your browser, visit MPEG.ORG.
[MP3][WAV] Southwestern speaker with mid-western influences
[MP3][WAV] American speaker with various influences
[MP3][WAV] American speaker from Southern California
[MP3][WAV] Western speaker with influences from all over America
[MP3][WAV] Standard American speech (assembled from the Random House Second Unabridged dictionary)
[MP3][WAV] Chicago speaker with influences from Iowa and Southern California
I teach Ferdinand
Accent determination by a short introduction with a few significant sentences.
Average file sizes (Kb): MP3 14, WAV 36. Text: "I teach Ferdinand the calm cat to fetch cold cups of coffee. Who knows more about tasting things? He's used the book."
ASCII IPA guide – numerous sound files illustrating the pronunciations of the symbols of ASCII IPA.
If you're looking for a sound file that has a particular word in it that you know, you may be able to find it by using the site-search facility to search on that word.
At Links: Audio references there are links to some remote sites at which various sound files can be found.
In particular, there's a large collection of English dialect examples from many different parts of the world at The University of Kansas IDEA site.
Technical information
The WAV files use a sampling frequency 11,025 Hz with 4-bit quantization, except for one that had originally been sampled at 8,000 Hz.
Some WAV files have been converted to 8-bit quantization because it was learned that some users were having problems with the 4-bit format.
Future submissions to the archive should be sampled at at least 22,050 Hz.
Submitted files will be used to create an MP3 file with 22,050 sampling rate. WAV files may be resampled to a lower rate.
Received pronunciation
"RP" stands for "Received Pronunciation". RP speaker 1, Markus Laker, describes himself as an "Older style" RP speaker. Actually,
there is a difference between Markus Laker's pronunciation and RP. See also pages ASCII IPA (Combined) and Interlinear transliterations.
Credits
I, (the originator of this page, Igor Merfert) would like to express my gratitude to every contributor.
Many thanks to
the Southern Irish speaker Brian J. Goggin, Ireland,
the General mid-western speaker, US (Michigan) Dr. Thomas M. Schenk, CA, USA,
the General mid-western speaker (Dayton, Ohio) Anandashankar Mazumdar, who comments "I believe my accent has been heavily influenced by the American mass media and I believe there are some (very) small influences of educated Indian and British R.P. accents",
the Canadian speaker with assorted influences Mark Israel, CA, USA,
the General Australian speaker Mark Barton, USA,
the Indian speaker Sridhar Prasad, USA,
the Southwestern speaker with mid-western influences Michael Tseng, CA, USA,
the Midwestern speaker (Dallas) Bill. T., TX, USA,
the British speaker with international influences Jitze Couperus, USA,
RP speaker 3 John Underwood, Conductor of the Prommers' Orchestra & Chorus, England,
the New York City born Northeastern speaker Larry Krakauer, USA,
the Western speaker with influences from all over America Bob Cunningham, USA,
and the New York City speaker recently relocated to Missouri, Michael Hamm, USA.
Special thanks to the audio archive consultant and RP speaker 1, Markus Laker, England.
Furthermore, I would like to thank the Universitätsrechenzentrum der Otto-von-Guericke-Universität Magdeburg for kindly providing
additional web space, and Felix Boenchendorf for converting the sound files to MP3-format.
Some of the MPEG files used here were converted from WAV files using the freeware program ACM Station (Version 2.1), which was written by Leeb Andreas, April 1999.
Others were converted with GoldWave.
The alt.usage.english Audio Archive was first opened by Igor Merfert on 10 October 1997. Igor announced in AUE on 16 June 1999 that the archive
had been closed at his site and would not reappear there.
Contribute!
If you would like to submit a sound sample to be added to the Audio Archive,
you are welcome to do so. If you are interested, please contact the webmaster.
Before you make a sound file, though, you are strongly recommended to read the
comments on sound recording.
