DIVERSE

DIVERSE: Database of Individual Variation in English by Recording style and SEx.

Multichannel recordings of female SSBE speakers for forensic phonetics.

In 2025, PhD students Chloe Patman and Alice Paver, along with co-investigators Dr Kirsty McDougall and Professor Paul Foulkes (University of York) were successfully awarded a research grant by the International Association for Forensic Phonetics and Acoustics (IAFPA)

The project aims to collect non-contemporaneous, style-controlled, multi-channel recordings from female speakers in a mock forensic scenario. This dataset will serve as a pilot for a larger data collection and provide a starting point for forensic phonetic analysis, offering reference statistics and facilitating future research for female speakers. The design of the tasks is modelled after the highly successful and widely cited DyViS project.

Data collection is well under way and the corpus, once complete, will be published as open access to enable researchers to make use of the materials.