Introduction

The CHAINS corpus is a speech database expressly designed to help to characterize speakers as individuals. The corpus contains the recordings of 36 speakers obtained in two different sessions with a time separation of about two months.

The design goal of the corpus is to provide a range of speaking styles and voice modifications for speakers sharing the same accent. Other existing corpora, in particular the CSLU Speaker Identification Corpus, the TIMIT corpus, and the IViE corpus served as referents in the selection of material. This design decision was made to ensure that methods designed and evaluated on the CHAINS corpus might be directly testable on these other corpora, which were recorded using quite different dialects and channel characteristics.