This paper describes a multi-microphone multi-language acoustic corpus being developed under the EC project Distant-speech Interaction for Robust Home Applications (DIRHA). The corpus is composed of several sequences obtained by convolution of dry acoustic events with more than 9000 impulse responses measured in a real apartment equipped with 40 microphones. The acoustic events include in-domain sentences of different typologies uttered by native speakers in four different languages and non-speech events representing typical domestic noises. To increase the realism of the resulting corpus, background noises were recorded in the real home environment and then added to the generated sequences. The purpose of this work is to describe the simulation procedure and the data sets that were created and used to derive the corpus. The corpus contains signals of different characteristics making it suitable for various multi-microphone signal processing and distant speech recognition tasks.