EMU: an Enhanced Hierarchical Speech Data Management System

EMU is a system for labelling, managing and retrieving data from speech databases such as the Australian ANDOSL database or the US TIMIT. EMU is a re-implementation of the earlier MU+ system (Harrington, Cassidy, Fletcher, and McVeigh 1993) with the aim of providing a more flexible environment. The hierarchical structures and database query facility have been generalised and the system has been extended to include an interactive labeller with spectrogram and waveform displays. EMU incorporates the Tcl/Tk scripting language which can be used to extend the labeller and to perform many automated operations on databases; as an example, scripts have been written to automatically construct hierarchical descriptions given Phonetic level labels. The need for increased flexibility was driven largely by the desire to use the system on languages other than English. This paper concludes by describing a database for Cantonese, and a database used in a kinematic study of vowel lengthening, both of which include facilities for automatically generating hierarchies.