Design of a whispered Chinese speech database

Whispered Chinese speech recognition is important in many applications. This paper summarized the acoustic characteristics of whispered speech and introduces existing whispered speech corpuses. A whispered speech corpus was then built with both male and female whispered and normal speech patterns for numbers. The whispered speech patterns are analyzed to identity what a speaker should emphasize, how to choose text materials for a corpus and how to construct the corpus. Then the corpus is used to analyze the acoustic characteristics of whispered Chinese speech.