A schematic overview of the Emu Speech Database Management system

1 In the beginning

The core idea behind Emu today is just the same as it was when it first launched in the mid-late 1980s at CSTR, Edinburgh University and known as APS which stood for Acoustic Phonetics in S

The core idea of Emu is:

• A speech database is a collection of utterances consisting of signal (waveform, formant, f0 etc) and annotation (label) files.

• There is a query language: annotations can be extracted from the database and read directly into R. E.g. find all [i] vowels in the database.

• These queried lists of annotations in R can be further queried to get the corresponding signals (*find the formants of the [i] vowels extracted at the previous step).

There have been some landmark changes to Emu since the APS-Edinburgh days of the 1980s.

1. In the 1990s (at Linguistics, Macquarie University, Sydney), Emu’s query language was updated to handle hierarchically structured annotations: see especially Cassidy & Harrington, (2001) (The name Emu evolved out of Extended MUlti-dimensional and because we were in Australia).

The author of the Emu query language is Steve Cassidy who can be seen here feeding the Emu ca. 1996. The query language is still in use today and the only one of its kind in existence.

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The point of hierarchical annotations is to be able to query annotations at one tier with respect to another. E.g., the previous query could be extended to:

• find all [i] vowels in the first syllable of trisyllabic accented words, but only if they are preceded by a function word in any L% intonational phrase.

2. From 2002-2006, the ASSP signal processing toolkit developed by Michel Scheffers of the IPdS, University of Kiel was integrated into Emu (Bombien et al,2006). ASSP then morphed into library(wrassp) ca. 2014.

3. In the last few years, the Emu engine was completely overhauled by Raphael Winkelmann with many excellent new features (See also Winkelmann et al, 2017) e.g.:

• Emu is launched and operates entirely within the R programming environment.

• an interactive graphical user interface for analysing and visualising data: the Emu-webApp

• extension of the query language to include regular expressions.

• far more rapid access to extracting annotations and their signal files from the database.

2 The Emu-SDMS