Phonetics - English Pronunciation of Vowels Corpus

Question

I am a physics student so forgive me if I'm not very precise with the language. I am currently taking an English course, and my teacher is specialized in teaching pronunciation. I am interested in checking if the students are objectively improving. I am interested in the vowels:

æ, ɑ, ʌ, ə, a

because as a Spanish speaker, they all sound very similar. I decided to create a sort of voice-recognition tool (actually it would be vowel-recognition). For this I am using the soundwave of those vowels pronounced by English people. I found this Oxford Corpus with many hours recorded. Here the speakers read some paragraphs.

The problem is that I would spend many hours trimming the audio files in order to extract just the part in which they say the specific vowels I need. I want to ask if any of you knows another Corpus just with vowels, as that would ease my work.

I appreciate your help.

Answer 1

For corpora in general, you can take a look at the Virtual Language Observatory (VLO). Just search for "English vowels" or something and see if you make a find.

Alternative suggestion: There is a plugin for Praat (the quasi-standard for phonetic analysis among linguists) that provides a script which "extracts the vowels of every selected Sound object and joins them into a new Sound object". I haven't used it myself so don't know how well it works, but you could give it a try. That way, you could continue to work with your existing corpus - read out full paragraphs seem like a more naturalistic, thus more promising resource than recordings of isolated vowels (if there exists such a corpus).