We introduce a unique, comprehensive Austrian German multi-sensor corpus with moving and non-moving speakers to facilitate the evaluation of estimators and detectors that jointly detect a speaker’s spatial and temporal parameters. The corpus is suitable for various machine learning and signal processing tasks, linguistic studies, and studies related to a speaker’s fundamental frequency (due to recorded glottograms). Available corpora are limited to (synthetically generated/spatialized) speech data or recordings of musical instruments that lack moving speakers, glottograms, and/or multi-channel distant speech recordings. That is why we recorded 24 spatially non-moving and moving speakers, balanced male and female, to set up a two-room and 43-channel Austrian German multi-sensor speech corpus. It contains 8.2 hours of read speech based on phonetically balanced sentences, commands, and digits. The orthographic transcriptions include around 53,000 word tokens and 2,070 word types. Special features of this corpus are the laryngograph recordings (representing glottograms required to detect a speaker’s instantaneous fundamental frequency and pitch), corresponding clean-speech recordings, and spatial information and video data provided by four Kinects and a camera.

This paper provides a description of the preparation, the speakers, the recordings, and the creation of the orthographic transcriptions of the first large scale speech database for Austrian German. It contains approximately 1900 minutes of (read and spontaneous) speech produced by 38 speakers. The corpus consists of three components. First, the Conversation Speech (CS) component contains free conversations of one hour length between friends, colleagues, couples, or family members. Second, the Commands Component (CC) contains commands and keywords which were either read or elicited by pictures. Third, the Read Speech (RS) component contains phonetically balanced sentences and digits. The speech of all components has been recorded at super-wideband quality in a soundproof recording-studio with head-mounted microphones, large-diaphragm microphones, a laryngograph, and with a video camera. The orthographic transcriptions, which have been created and subsequently corrected manually, contain approximately 290 000 word tokens from 15 000 different word types.