Accents
mon3apr2006—14w093d25%—20h38m00s—0utc
Of course I’m fascinated with the Speech Accent Archive: a massive (521 samples) archive of English accents from all over the world! They put native and non-native English speakers to read the same sound-rich English paragraph, record them, and then painstakingly transcribe the reading to phonetic symbols and even point out error generalizations (it turns out Mexican poblanos speak with “final obstruent devoicing”, “interdental fricative to stop”, and so on…). It’s pure beauty — though it’s a shame that there’s only one Mexican accent in there, I’m thinking of sending my own recording (they do accept them and even have some precise instructions).
2 Comments
Cool site, I planned a project with a friend called myusaccents.com. I was planning on making a flash interface to a Rails powered back-end.
The reason for the Flash you ask? It was going to be opened up for anyone to record their own reading. Directly on the website. Let’s see your HTML do that.Oh and the reason I didn’t finish, I found the site you linked to. I’ve still got the domain name though.
-JoshInteresting. Well, there’s that page but there are huge untapped possibilities outside English. I’d love to see something similar for Spanish, for one thing, and I remember my German professor’s yearning for his hometown accent…
You know, it would be cool, some years hence, when speech becomes an established interface to computing, to have your computer speak in accents. I think I’d have mine speak in ‘pocho’ female Spanish or maybe in Natalie Portman’s overdone British (“What did you do to my haaa?”).> Let's see your HTML do that.
hehBtw, this was on reddit today, did you read that billg uses three, synchronized monitors?