Technical Notes

The older recordings are made with a standard $10 computer fair headset/boom microphone, the newer with an Andrea NC-72, both into an Ensonique/Creative AudioPCI card (ES1370 chipset). This seems to be regarded as the best relatively cheap card for quality sound recording (for example speech recognition). Also Quartz Studio Free as the recording software, this was the only free recording program I could find that seemed to produce decent sound quality (the Praat program, linked to below, also produces good quality).

The exported .wav files are then compressed with the standard windows sound recorder, using mpeg layer 3 compression, and the Real Audio files made with RealProducer Basic (corporate LAN setting needed for adequate sound quality) (note: RealProducer can't process the compressed .wav's, only the uncompressed originals).

For phonetic investigations, there is a great freeware tool called Praat, by Paul Boersma and David Weenink, which can display waveforms, extract pitch contours, etc. Praat won't work on the mp3-compressed files; they can be decompressed with Windows Sound Recorder (not Media Player), but the results don't sound very good, you might be happier working with the original uncompressed versions, which I can supply on CD for a small materials, nuisance and shipping charge.

Created by: Avery Andrews
Maintained by: Avery Andrews
Last modified: 8 July, 2002