Toronto Emotional Speech Set (TESS): 2,800 Audio Samples of 7 Emotions

2,800 audio stimuli of 200 target words spoken in a carrier phrase by two actresses. The set includes recordings for seven distinct emotions: anger, disgust, fear, happiness, pleasant surprise, sadness, and neutral. It was created by M. Kathleen Pichora‐Fuller at the University of Toronto, modeled on the Northwestern University Auditory Test No. 6.

Use Cases

• Train speech emotion recognition models based on seven labeled emotional states.
• Benchmark audio classification algorithms on a controlled set of acted emotional speech.
• Study acoustic features of emotional prosody based on recordings from two female speakers.
• Develop multimodal affective systems using the well-defined emotional categories.

Strengths

• Contains 2,800 total audio stimuli, providing a substantial sample size.
• Covers seven distinct emotional categories, including pleasant surprise.
• Recordings feature two actresses with confirmed normal hearing thresholds, university education, and musical training.

Limitations

• Column-level documentation is absent; field semantics must be inferred after download.
• Last update date is unknown; freshness unverified.
• Data may reflect geographic and demographic bias inherent to the two Toronto-area speakers.

Provenance

Source

University of Toronto

Collection Method

Actresses recorded 200 target words in a carrier phrase while portraying specific emotions.

Geography

Toronto, Canada