Introducing the Database ExamStress for Speech under Stress

This paper briefly describes a newly created database of Czech speech under realistic stressed conditions and presents some selected results achieved by analyzing stressed speech. The motivation for creating a new database was the non-existence of stressed speech corpora for Czech or any other Slavic language. The database contains read and conversational speech both in neutral and stressed state of 31 male speakers. The stressed speech was recorded during final oral examinations at the Brno University of Technology. In order to quantify the stress of individual speakers the speaker´s heart rate was also measured and recorded simultaneously with the speech. Experiments conducted using this database show that the speech corpus can be used for development and evaluation of specific algorithms by identifying the extent of stress speakers have by analyzing their voices only