Harmonic-Frontier-Audio/Breathy_and_SemiModal_Phonation_Preview

Harmonic Frontier Audio – Breathy & Semi-Modal Phonation (Preview, v0.9)

A high-fidelity human vocal dataset designed for AI training, speech research, and expressive voice modeling.

Breathy & Semi-Modal Phonation (Preview), created by Harmonic Frontier Audio, provides a compact reference set demonstrating the quality, formatting, and metadata conventions used in the Harmonic Frontier Audio Human Vocality Primitives series.

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🔎 Summary

This dataset provides high-quality, rights-cleared recordings of breathy and semi-modal phonation gestures — soft, partially turbulent voicing behaviors that sit between fully modal phonation and non-voiced airflow noise.

The recordings emphasize:

• turbulent / aspirate onsets
• airy harmonic structure (mixed periodic + aperiodic energy)
• controlled transitions between breathy and more stable voicing
• low-intensity phonation suitable for fine-grained onset and timbre modeling

These characteristics make the dataset valuable for AI speech modeling, phonetics research, voice synthesis, breath-aware phonation modeling, and human-aligned vocal control systems.

Developed by Harmonic Frontier Audio, this preview follows The Proteus Standard™ for dataset provenance, transparency, and ethical AI use.
Learn more about the Proteus Standard → https://harmonicfrontieraudio.com/proteus-standard

Full dataset details and licensing information are available at:
https://harmonicfrontieraudio.com/datasets/breathy-semi-modal-phonation

If you find this dataset useful, please consider giving it a 🤍 on Hugging Face to help others discover it.

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🌬️ About Breathy & Semi-Modal Phonation

Breathy phonation occurs when the vocal folds vibrate with incomplete closure, allowing continuous airflow leakage and adding a strong noise component to the sound.
Semi-modal phonation refers to a stable but softer voicing mode that retains harmonic structure while remaining closer to breathy or airflow-adjacent behavior than fully modal speech voice.

These phenomena are foundational to:

• expressive voice production and timbral control
• onset and aspiration modeling in speech synthesis
• phonation-type classification and physiological modeling
• controllable voice systems that need interpretable “softness,” “airiness,” or “effort” dimensions

This dataset presents a neutral, non-linguistic, non-performative representation of breathy and semi-modal phonation.
It is not designed to encode semantic speech content, but rather to isolate acoustic primitives that underlie airy voicing and turbulent onset behavior.

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📂 Contents

Audio Files (.wav)

• Recorded at 96 kHz / 24-bit WAV format
• Exported as mono
• Fade-ins and fade-outs of 3–5 ms applied for consistency
• No compression, normalization, or creative processing applied
• High-pass filtered at ~40 Hz to remove subsonic rumble

This preview includes 5 representative audio files, selected to demonstrate:

• soft phonation with audible airflow leakage
• turbulent onsets and breath-dominant attacks
• airy harmonic profiles with mixed periodic/aperiodic structure
• subtle transitions toward more stable voicing

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Metadata (.csv)

Includes structured fields for:

• file name
• sound source type
• airflow type
• phonation type
• gesture and articulation descriptors
• microphone and recording chain
• sample rate, bit depth, and dataset version

Metadata follows the Harmonic Frontier Audio – Foundations schema.

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🎤 Recording Notes

• Recorded in a treated studio environment using a single-mic setup:
  • Microphone: Rode NT1-A condenser microphone
  • Recording chain: Rode NT1-A → Zoom F8n Pro
• Captured at 96 kHz / 32-bit float, rendered as 96 kHz / 24-bit mono WAV for release.
• Natural room tone and low-level breath noise were preserved to retain acoustic realism.

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🌈 Spectrogram Preview

Below is a spectrogram illustrating the mixed harmonic + broadband noise structure, turbulent onset energy, and airflow leakage characteristic of breathy and semi-modal phonation gestures:

⚡ Usage

This preview pack is designed for:

• Evaluation of Harmonic Frontier Audio dataset quality and structure
• Testing AI systems that model phonation type, onset behavior, and airy vocal timbre
• Research in phonetics, speech synthesis, and expressive vocal modeling
• Creative sound design involving breathy voice textures and soft vocal gestures

👉 Note: This is not a full dataset.
The complete Breathy & Semi-Modal Phonation dataset includes a substantially larger and more varied set of phonation primitives and is available for licensing.

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💡 Full Dataset Availability

This is a preview pack of the Breathy & Semi-Modal Phonation Dataset.
The complete dataset is available for commercial licensing.

For licensing inquiries:
📩 info@harmonicfrontieraudio.com

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📥 How to Use This Dataset in Python

You can load the Parquet-converted version of this dataset directly with the datasets library:

from datasets import load_dataset

dataset = load_dataset(
    "Harmonic-Frontier-Audio/Breathy_and_SemiModal_Phonation_Preview",
    split="train"
)

print(dataset)

⚙️ Note: Parquet conversion and load_dataset() support will be available within 2–3 days of publication.

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🔗 Explore More from Harmonic Frontier Audio

• Breathy & Semi-Modal Phonation (Preview)
• Whisper and Aspiration (Preview)
• Plosives and Non-Lexical Consonant Bursts (Preview)
• Scottish Smallpipes (Preview)
• Highland Bagpipes (Preview)
• Irish Tin Whistle in D (Preview)
• Subharmonic Phonation / Vocal Fry (Preview)
• Kalimba (Preview)
• Kazoo (Preview)
• Overtone Singing (Preview)

(All datasets follow The Proteus Standard™ for ethical dataset provenance and licensing.)

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📜 License

Released under CC BY-NC 4.0.

• Free for non-commercial use, testing, and research
• Commercial licensing available via Harmonic Frontier Audio
• A formal rights declaration is included in this dataset bundle

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📧 Contact

Harmonic Frontier Audio
📩 info@harmonicfrontieraudio.com
🌐 https://harmonicfrontieraudio.com/

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🗒️ Release Notes

Version 0.9 (March 2026) – Initial Preview Pack release for Breathy & Semi-Modal Phonation.
See CHANGELOG.md for detailed version history.

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Citation

If you use this dataset in your research, please cite:

Pullen, B. (2026). Breathy & Semi-Modal Phonation Dataset (Preview) [Data set]. Harmonic Frontier Audio. Zenodo. https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.18862239

ORCID: https://orcid.org/0009-0003-4527-0178

BibTeX

@dataset{pullen_2026_breathy_semimodal_phonation_preview,
  author       = {Blake Pullen},
  title        = {Breathy & Semi-Modal Phonation Dataset (Preview)},
  year         = {2026},
  publisher    = {Harmonic Frontier Audio},
  version      = {0.9},
  doi          = {10.5281/zenodo.18862239},
  url          = {https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.18862239}
}