The Spoken Word

The Spoken Word grant enabled an expansion of The Debating Society commission to develop a high-quality phonetic archive of colloquial Gorbals conversational speech.

In collaboration with Gorbals Arts Project, The Citz Theatre and Edinburgh University's Centre for Speech Technology Research, a series of synthetic voices, lexicons and libraries were created from live parrallel audio recordings conducted during 2003-4. The resulting material was developed into voices compatible with the Open Source, Festival speech engine and provide a permanent snapshot record of informal speech from within a community experiencing extraordinary urban change.