The Harvard Sentences are a collection of sample phrases that are used for standardized testing of Voice over IP, cellular, and other telephone systems. They are phonetically-balanced sentences that use specific phonemes at the same frequency they appear in English.
IEEE Recommended Practices for Speech Quality Measurements sets out 72 lists of 10 phrases, described as the "1965 Revised List of Phonetically Balanced Sentences (Harvard Sentences)." They are widely used in research in telecoms, speech and acoustics, where standardized and repeatable sequences of speech are needed. The Open Speech Repository provides some freely usable, prerecorded WAV files of Harvard Sentences in American and British English, in male and female voices.
Read more about Harvard Sentences: Example
Famous quotes containing the words harvard and/or sentences:
“And the Harvard students in the brick
hallowed houses studied Sappho in cement rooms.
And this Sappho danced on the grass
and danced and danced and danced.
It was a death dance.”
—Anne Sexton (1928–1974)
“Methinks the human method of expression by sound of tongue is very elementary, & ought to be substituted for some ingenious invention which should be able to give vent to at least six coherent sentences at once.”
—Virginia Woolf (1882–1941)