This project was built using data provided by George Mason University's Speech Accent Archive. Each subject recorded the same paragraph of text containing a wide variety of English language sounds:

Please call Stella. Ask her to bring these things with her from the store: Six spoons of fresh snow peas, five thick slabs of blue cheese, and maybe a snack for her brother Bob. We also need a small plastic snake and a big toy frog for the kids. She can scoop these things into three red bags, and we will go meet her Wednesday at the train station.

The Map shows pins for each of those samples in the subjects' respective birth locations. I would like to expand functionality to visualize birth location relative to current residence, age / length of exposure to English, etc, but for now it's just a fun way to click around and hear accents from different parts of the world.

Scoring Similarity

A very sloppy comparison score was generated for each unique pair of speech samples, and you can view these similarities by clicking "Compare with Color" on any given map pin. The selected pin will turn black, and the rest of the pins will appear somewhere on a grayscale, the darker ones being closer in comparison. This comparison was done using PHP's similar_text() function, and is extremely sloppy. I would like to improve it, but this serves as a proof of concept for now.