A British National Corpus Spoken Audio Sampler

Copyright and access terms

Use of BNC spoken audio recordings is governed by the terms of the original recording permissions agreement with the contributors, which requires that they can only be "used for scientific study and publication by writers of dictionaries and educational material and language researchers". Furthermore, by downloading any of the audio files, you agree to the terms in section 2, 6, 7 and 9 of the BNC User Licence (available here), the audio recordings being understood to be among the "spoken texts" included in the "BNC Texts". The supporting Praat TextGrid annotation and HTML transcription files are Copyright © 2011 The University of Oxford, and are made publicly available under a Creative Commons Attribution License (details here); if you use these files, you must cite the Audio BNC corpus as follows: 

John Coleman, Ladan Baghai-Ravary, John Pybus, and Sergio Grau (2012) Audio BNC: the audio edition of the Spoken British National Corpus. Phonetics Laboratory, University of Oxford. http://www.phon.ox.ac.uk/AudioBNC

Registered users are welcome to link to or directly access the sound files and associated annotation and transcription files listed on this page. (Here is a brief description of the BNC Spoken Audio Sampler, including the registration form.)

The audio files given here are 16-bit, 1-channel (monophonic) .wav files, with sampling rate 16,000 samples per second. Their rather long filenames encode a combination of the British Library's catalogue code and the 3-character "BNC codes". We provide examples from both the demographic part of the spoken corpus (naturally-occurring spontaneous conversationscollected across various dialects, ages and socioeconomic groups) and the context-governed part (unscripted speech from a variety of more formal situations). HTML versions of the transcriptions, in ordinary spelling, and Praat TextGrid annotation files are also provided. The TextGrid files may be used together with the .wav audio files in the freely-available Praat speech processing package to view or to find selected words, vowels or consonants in each audio file. For users who are unfamiliar with Praat, a short explanation of how to do this is given here.

In future, we'd like to make search as easy as this demo (only works in some audio-aware browsers, e.g. Firefox 3.6 or later, Safari 5 or later, Opera 10.5 or later, Internet Explorer 9 beta), or browsing as easy as this demo. Please feel free to send us any feedback or comments about these demos or other tools you would find useful.

Please note: we may change these files at any time, in order to make corrections or improvements to them.