In this paper, we present a database of emotional speech intended to be open-sourced and used for synthesis and generation purpose. It contains data for male and female actors in English and a male actor in French. The database covers 5 emotion classes so it could be suitable to build synthesis and voice transformation systems with the potential to control the emotional dimension in a continuous way. We show the data's efficiency by building a simple MLP system converting neutral to angry speech style and evaluate it via a CMOS perception test. Even though the system is a very simple one, the test show the efficiency of the data which is promising for future work.
The CMU Arctic databases designed for the purpose of speech synthesis research. These single speaker speech databases have been carefully recorded under studio conditions and consist of approximately 1200 phonetically balanced English utterances. In addition to wavefiles, the databases provide complete support for the Festival Speech Synthesis System, including pre-built voices that may be used as is. The entire package is distributed as free software, without restriction on commercial or non-commercial use. We describe the design and recording of a high quality French speech corpus, aimed at building TTS systems, investigate multiple styles, and emphasis. The data was recorded by a French voice talent, and contains about ten hours of speech, including emphasised words in many different contexts. The database contains more than ten hours of speech and is freely available.