Harmonic Frontier Audio -- Plosives and Non-Lexical Consonant Bursts (Preview, v0.9)

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

Plosives and Non-Lexical Consonant Bursts (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.

🔎 Summary

This dataset provides high-quality, rights-cleared recordings of plosive articulations and short-duration non-lexical consonant burst gestures --- discrete vocal events produced through controlled vocal tract closure and rapid release.

The recordings emphasize: - articulatory closure and release - transient airflow dynamics - burst intensity and envelope shape - non-linguistic consonant gestures

These characteristics make the dataset valuable for AI speech and voice modeling, phonetics research, articulation-aware synthesis, onset 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/plosives-non-lexical-consonant-bursts

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

🫁 About Plosives and Non-Lexical Consonant Bursts

Plosives are produced by complete or near-complete closure of the vocal tract followed by a controlled release of air pressure, resulting in a short, high-energy acoustic burst.
Non-lexical consonant bursts refer to similar transient gestures produced without linguistic intent or semantic content.

These vocal behaviors are foundational to: - speech articulation and onset modeling - expressive and controllable voice synthesis - articulation-aware AI systems - phonetic and physiological research

This dataset presents a neutral, non-linguistic, non-performative representation of plosive and consonant burst gestures.
It is not designed to encode semantic speech content, but rather to isolate gesture-level acoustic primitives underlying consonant articulation.

📂 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 ~60 Hz to reduce proximity effect and subsonic rumble

This preview includes 3 representative audio files, selected to demonstrate: - clean pulmonic egressive plosive articulation - contrasting non-lexical consonant burst gestures - variation in burst intensity and release character

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 and is a strict subset of the full production metadata.

🎤 Recording Notes

• Recorded in a treated studio environment using a single-mic setup:
  • Microphone: RØDE NT1-A condenser microphone
  • Recording chain: RØDE NT1-A → Zoom F8n Pro
• Captured at 96 kHz / 32-bit float, rendered as 96 kHz / 24-bit mono WAV for release.
• Natural transient dynamics were preserved to maintain articulatory realism

⚡ Usage

This preview pack is designed for:

• Evaluation of Harmonic Frontier Audio dataset quality and structure\
• Testing AI systems that model consonant articulation and onset behavior\
• Research in phonetics, speech production, and expressive voice modeling\
• Creative sound design involving transient vocal gestures

👉 Note: This is not a full dataset.
The complete Plosives and Non-Lexical Consonant Bursts dataset includes a broader and more balanced articulatory inventory and is available for licensing.

💡 Full Dataset Availability

This is a preview pack of the Plosives and Non-Lexical Consonant Bursts Dataset.
The complete dataset is available for commercial licensing.

For licensing inquiries:
📩 info@harmonicfrontieraudio.com

📜 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

📧 Contact

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

🗒️ Release Notes

Version 0.9 (Jan. 2026) -- Initial Preview Pack release for Plosives and Non-Lexical Consonant Bursts.
See CHANGELOG.md for detailed version history.

Citation

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

Pullen, B. (2026). Plosives and Non-Lexical Consonant Bursts Dataset (Preview) [Data set]. Harmonic Frontier Audio. Zenodo. https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.18499679

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