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EMU 2.0 Release, May 2008

We are very proud to present the newest Release of Emu which includes binaries not only for Windows but also for Linux and now even for Mac OS X. A lot of code in this new release has been rewritten or reorganized. This enables us to build Emu in basically the same way on most platforms where Tcl/Tk is supported.

Short summary of changes in Emu 2.0

• The new interface dbemu provides a lucid view of all available databases, quick access to all tools that come along with Emu and variety of new ways to work on the utterances of a database
• The Emu Labeller has been completely rewritten - finally making Emu entirely available for Mac OS X. This includes the abandoning of the padgraph and trackdata packages used in 1.x releases and replacing them using Snack and and the extension snackssff. Also included is the beta version of a new hierarchy view which will improve the display of hierarchy trees
• Most graphical interfaces have been overhauled using themeable widgets from the tile / ttk package
• A number of new applications can now be found in Emu
  • Emu-Conf enables the quick access to new databases templates in non-standard directories
  • DB Installer can download and unpack databases from the internet and then adapt and configure them for the user's environment
  • EPG2SSFF can convert Raw EPG data (Reading) to the SSFF format used in Emu
• tkassp, Emu's signal processing tool has adapted to the launch and the ongoing changes in the new libassp project
• All non-tcl code has been reorganized to conform with the Tcl Extension Architecture ( TEA)
• Emu can "speak" with Praat and WaveSurfer

All Emu downloads are available via the .

Troubleshooting

This software is likely to contain bugs. If you think you have encountered a bug, please don't hesitate to consult our Bug Tracking System and eventually report your problem.

Source Distribution

The source distribution is a snapshot of the Emu sources at the release date. The source should build easily on Linux with and should build on Solaris as long as a recent gcc and Gnu make are available. It may also build on other flavours of Unix but has only been tested on these two platforms. Instructions for compilation are in the README file within the distribution.

In addition to the above released sources, the latest version of the source via anonymous CVS is available from the Please note that the CVS version may not compile in all configurations.

A number of packages needed to build a full EMU system are version Version 8.5 of and the latest versions (CVS snapshots) of libassp and tclassp, both found at libassp Emu also requires the Tcl standard library (tcllib), tklib the Bwidgets Tcl library, both available via Sourceforge as well as the memchan, tclvfs, trf and tkimg packages. All these packages are also available via Active Tcl.

Library Emu in the Software package R

The Emu-R library is a collection of programs running within the R programming language for the analysis of any speech database that can be read by the Emu Speech Database System.

Installing Emu/R

Installation of the Emu functions for R is simple as the package is now hosted by the The Comprehensive R Archive Network. After you have installed R (see The R Project for Statistical Computing for details of how to do this) start up R and then install the the Emu-R library with:

install.packages("emu")

Alternatively, you can dowload the Emu-R package from SourceForge.

The actual R-CRAN package requires >= EMU2.0 (no prev).

If you use the EMU2.0prev, download the EmuR Package emu_3.0.zip from SourceForge.

ToBI is a system for transcribing the intonation patterns of spoken language. ToBI defines a number of annotation levels and the criteria for placing labels on each. These labels include a segmentation into words along with tone labels which mark prosodic events such as prosodic tones and phrase boundary events. ToBI annotations have largely been made using the Unix based Waves+ toolkit from Entropic and the example materials are made available in the ESPS format which is readable only by Waves+ (and by Emu when an ESPS licence is available -- ie. on a Unix platform). This page describes some tools for using ToBI annotation in the Emu system.

The ToBI training materials available from the Ohio State web site are in the ESPS format. We have converted these files to the SSFF format read by Emu on both Unix and Windows. These files are now available on our server:

• tobi-examples-emu.zip (8.3M) the ToBI examples in SSFF (zip format)
• tobi-examples-emu.tar.gz (8.0M) the ToBI examples in SSFF (tar.gz format for unix)
• tobi-examples-emu-small.zip (806K) a small sample of the ToBI examples in SSFF (zip format)
• tobi-examples-emu-small.tar.gz (787K) a small sample of the ToBI examples in SSFF (tar.gz format for unix)

The smaller files consist of only 12 utterances from the database (those beginning with `a').

These packages contain the original label files (augmented with a dummy label at the start of the word level so that Emu can treat the words as segments rather than events). Two Emu template files are provided, one mimics the traditional ToBI annotation scheme which presents four independant tiers, the other adds domination relations and two additional levels for intonational and intermediate phrases. A script is provided to convert traditional flat ToBI annotations into hierarchical ones. An example hierarchical annotation is shown below.

In this scheme, the Tone level is preserved, non-phrasal tones are linked to the word in which they occur and words are grouped into Intonational and Intermediate phrases based on the position of phrase boundary events.

Pitch Tracking on Windows

Researchers investigating prosody have relied on ESPS/Waves+ for both labelling and pitch tracking. Emu can manage the labelling role but does not provide a pitch tracker. There are a number of possible pitch trackers that might be of use.

Fortunately, the ESPS codebase has now been donated to the KTH speech group and is now being integrated into the Snack toolkit. The most recent release of Snack includes the ESPS pitch and formant tracker code and the most recent Emu release contains a simple tool to run these over speech data and produce SSFF formatted data files for your corpus.

Publications

In progress

Harrington, J. (in preparation). The Phonetic Analysis of Speech Corpora. Blackwell.

Harrington, J. (in press). Acoustic Phonetics. In the revised Edition of Hardcastle W. & Laver J. (Eds.), The Handbook of Phonetic Sciences. Blackwell.

2006

Bombien, L., Cassidy, S., Harrington, J., John, T., Palethorpe, S. (2006). Recent Developments in the Emu Speech Database System. Proceedings of the Australian Speech Science and Technology Conference, Auckland, December 2006.

2003

Harrington, J., Cassidy, S., John, T. and Scheffers, M. (2003). Building an interface between EMU and Praat: a modular approach to speech database analysis. International Congress of Phonetic Sciences, Barcelona, August 2003. (4 pages).

2002

Steve Cassidy, XQuery as an Annotation Query Language: a Use Case Analysis, Proceedings of LREC 2002, Las Palmas, Spain, May 2002.

2001

Bird, S. and Harrington, J. (2001). Speech annotation and corpus tools. Speech Communication, 33, 1-4.

Bird, S. and Harrington, J. (Editors) (2001). Guest Editors for Special Issue on Speech Annotation and Corpora. Speech Communication. Vol. 33, 1-174.

Cassidy, S. and Harrington, J. (2001). Multi-level annotation in the Emu speech database management system. Speech Communication, 33, 61-77

2000

Cassidy, S. and Bird, S. (2000) Querying Databases of Annotated Speech, Proceedings of the Australian Database Conference, Canberra, January 2000.

Cassidy, S., Welby, P., McGory, J., and Beckman, M. (2000) Testing the Adequacy of Query Languages Against Annotated Spoken Dialog. Proceedings of the Speech Science and Technology Conference, Canberra, December 2000.

1999

Cassidy, S. (1999) Compiling Multi-Tiered Speech Databases into the Relational Model: Experiments with the Emu System. In Proceedings of Eurospeech '99, Budapest, September 1999.

Harrington, J. & Cassidy, S. (1999). Techniques in Speech Acoustics. Kluwer Academic Publishers: Foris, Dordrecht. ISBN: 0-7923-5731-0.

1997

Millar, J., Dermody, P., Harrington, J., and Vonwiller, J. (1997). Spoken Language Resources for Australian Speech Technology. Journal Of Electrical and Electronic Engineers Australia, 1, 13-23.

1996

Cassidy, S. and Harrington, J. (1996). EMU: an enhanced hierarchical speech database management system. Proceedings of the 6th Australian International Conference on Speech Science and Technology (p. 361-366).

1994

Harrington, J. & So, L. (1994). Some design criteria in the annotation of a spoken database of Cantonese. Fifth International Conference on Speech Science and Technology, Perth, Australia. (4 pages).

Millar, J.B., Vonwiller, J.P., Harrington, J. and Dermody, P.J. (1994). The Australian National Database Of Spoken Language, Proceedings International Conference on Acoustics, Speech and Signal Processing, ICASSP-94, Adelaide, (pp.I97-I100).

1993

Harrington, J., Cassidy, S., Fletcher, J. and McVeigh, A. (1993). The mu+ system for corpus-based speech research. Computer Speech & Language, 7, 305-331.

1992

Croot, K., Fletcher, J. and Harrington, J. (1992). Phonetic segmentation on the Australian National Database of Spoken Language. Proceedings of the Fourth International Conference on Speech Science and Technology. (p.86-90). Brisbane, Australia.

McVeigh, A. and Harrington, J. (1992). The mu+ system for speech database analysis. Proceedings of the Fourth International Conference on Speech Science and Technology. (p.548-553). Brisbane, Australia.

Harrington, J. and McVeigh (1992). Analysing acoustic and articulatory speech data using the mu+ speech database interrogation system. Journal of the Acoustical Society of America, vol. 91, supplement 1. (A).

Millar, J., Dermody, P., Harrington, J. & Vonwiller, J. (1992). A national cluster of spoken language databases for Australia. Proc. of the Third Australian Int. Conference on Speech Science and Technology. Melbourne, Australia. (4 pages).

1990

Millar, J., Dermody, P., Harrington, J. & Vonwiller, J. (1990). A national database of spoken language; concept, design, and implementation. Proc. of the International Conference on Spoken Language Processing (ICSLP-90). Kobe, Japan. (4 pages).

1988

Harrington, J. & Watson, G. (1988). Acoustic Phonetics in S. Unpublished m/s Centre for Speech Technology Research, University of Edinburgh.

Miscellaneous Information

We are in the process of transferring additional information from the old website to the new design. Meanwhile please visit the old site:
Old Emu Site