Harmonic-Frontier-Audio/Mouth_Clicks_Smacks_and_Pop_Articulations_Preview

Harmonic Frontier Audio – Mouth Clicks, Smacks and Pop Articulations (Preview, v0.9)

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

Mouth Clicks, Smacks and Pop Articulations (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 close-miked percussive oral gestures, including clicks, smacks, and pop-like articulations — short-duration, high-transient acoustic events produced through rapid oral closure, release, and suction mechanisms.

The recordings emphasize:

• diverse transient attack shapes
• micro-duration impulse characteristics
• oral cavity pressure and suction events
• fine-grained percussive articulation control

These characteristics make the dataset valuable for AI speech and vocal onset modeling, percussive transient synthesis, phonetic research, and human-aligned control of short-duration articulatory events.

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/mouth-clicks-smacks-pop-articulations

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

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👄 About Mouth Clicks, Smacks and Pop Articulations

Mouth clicks and smacks are produced through rapid oral cavity closure and release, often involving suction-based pressure differentials and quick lip or tongue separation events.
Pop articulations include short, percussive impulse-like sounds created through controlled labial or lingual release gestures.

These phenomena are foundational to:

• consonant onset and transient modeling
• percussive vocal sound design
• articulatory impulse synthesis
• embodied and multimodal agent sound generation
• detailed phonetic study of non-voiced oral gestures

This dataset presents a neutral, non-linguistic, non-performative representation of percussive oral articulations.
It is not designed to encode semantic speech content, but rather to isolate transient acoustic primitives driven by rapid oral pressure changes and release events.

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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 3 representative audio files, selected to demonstrate:

• distinct transient envelope shapes
• varying oral pressure release characteristics
• tongue- and lip-based percussive articulations

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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 transient dynamics were preserved to maintain articulatory realism.

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🌈 Spectrogram Preview

Below is a spectrogram illustrating the sharp broadband transient spikes, rapid energy decay, and impulse-like spectral signatures characteristic of percussive oral click and pop gestures:

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⚡ Usage

This preview pack is designed for:

• Evaluation of Harmonic Frontier Audio dataset quality and structure
• Testing AI systems that model vocal transients and articulatory impulses
• Research in phonetics and non-voiced oral gesture modeling
• Creative sound design involving percussive vocal elements

👉 Note: This is not a full dataset.
The complete Mouth Clicks, Smacks and Pop Articulations dataset includes a substantially larger and more varied set of percussive vocal primitives and is available for licensing.

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💡 Full Dataset Availability

This is a preview pack of the Mouth Clicks, Smacks and Pop Articulations 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/Mouth_Clicks_Smacks_and_Pop_Articulations_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)
• Nasalization and Velum Control (Preview)
• Mouth Clicks, Smacks and Pop Articulations (Preview)
• Whisper and Aspiration (Preview)
• Plosives and Non-Lexical Consonant Bursts (Preview)
• Subharmonic Phonation / Vocal Fry (Preview)
• Overtone Singing (Preview)
• Scottish Smallpipes (Preview)
• Highland Bagpipes (Preview)
• Irish Tin Whistle in D (Preview)
• Kalimba (Preview)
• Kazoo (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 Mouth Clicks, Smacks and Pop Articulations.
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). Mouth Clicks, Smacks and Pop Articulations Dataset (Preview) [Data set]. Harmonic Frontier Audio. Zenodo. https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.18862994

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

BibTeX

@dataset{pullen_2026_mouth_clicks_smacks_pop_preview,
  author       = {Blake Pullen},
  title        = {Mouth Clicks, Smacks and Pop Articulations Dataset (Preview)},
  year         = {2026},
  publisher    = {Harmonic Frontier Audio},
  version      = {0.9},
  doi          = {10.5281/zenodo.18862994},
  url          = {https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.18862994}
}