Introducing AmuS: The Amused Speech Database

In this paper we present the AmuS database of about three hours worth of data related to amused speech recorded from two males and one female subjects and contains data in two languages French and English. We review previous work on smiled speech and speech-laughs. We describe acoustic analysis on part of our database, and a perception test comparing speech-laughs with smiled and neutral speech. We show the efficiency of the data in AmuS for synthesis of amused speech by training HMM-based models for neutral and smiled speech for each voice and comparing them using an on-line CMOS test.