CLEESE ("Ministry of Silly Speech") is a sound-manipulation software tool designed to generate an infinite number of natural-sounding, expressive variations around an original speech recording. More precisely, CLEESE creates random fluctuations around the file’s original contour of pitch, loudness, timbre and speed (i.e. roughly defined, its prosody). One of its foreseen applications is the generation of very many random voice stimuli for reverse correlation experiments.

CLEESE is a free, standalone Python module, distributed under an open-source MIT Licence. It was designed by Juan José Burred, Emmanuel Ponsot and Jean-Julien Aucouturier (STMS, IRCAM/CNRS/Sorbonne Université, Paris), with collaboration from Pascal Belin (Institut des Neurosciences de la Timone, Aix-Marseille Université), and with generous funding from the European Research Council (CREAM 335536, 2014-2019, PI: JJ Aucouturier).

A tutorial notebook is available here.

The user manual in PDF format is available here.