PeopleofSuperintelligence

Researcher

Alan W. Black

Also known as Alan Black

Alan W. Black is a computer scientist whose work centers on speech synthesis and open software for building synthetic voices. He studied at Coventry University and the University of Edinburgh, worked in Japan and at Edinburgh, and joined CMU in 1999. His work includes Festival, Festvox voice-building tools, and CMU Wilderness, a dataset with aligned speech in more than 650 languages. ISCA named him a Fellow in 2017 for leadership in automatic speech synthesis; as of October 2026, he is professor emeritus at Carnegie Mellon.

Works
442
Citations
18,899
h-index
61

Publication numbers from OpenAlex, as of 15 October 2026.

Timeline

  1. 1984–1993

    Degrees at Coventry and Edinburgh

    He graduates from Coventry University in 1984, earns a master's degree at the University of Edinburgh in 1986, and completes a Ph.D. there in 1993.

  2. By 1999

    Research in Japan and Edinburgh

    He works at the Advanced Telecommunications Research Institute International in Japan and at the University of Edinburgh before joining CMU's research faculty in 1999.

  3. 1999

    Festival system documentation

    In June 1999, he co-authors the Festival Version 1.4.0 system documentation with Paul Taylor and Richard Caley. Festival offers a multilingual text-to-speech framework.

  4. 1999–2022

    Faculty and voice-building tools

    He joins CMU's research faculty in 1999 and becomes a regular faculty member with tenure in 2008. He continues developing Festival and works on Festvox tools for building new voices and languages.

  5. 2017

    An ISCA Fellowship

    In 2017, ISCA names him a Fellow for leadership in automatic speech synthesis.

  6. 2019

    CMU Wilderness dataset

    He publishes the CMU Wilderness Multilingual Speech Dataset in 2019. It contains aligned speech from more than 650 languages, with about 20 hours per language.

  7. Since 2022

    Retiring from Carnegie Mellon

    In June 2022, he retires as a full professor from CMU and moves to Anchorage to concentrate on new open-source projects.

  8. As of October 2026

    Professor emeritus at CMU

    As of October 2026, he is professor emeritus in natural language processing and computational linguistics at CMU.

Sources and credits

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  1. Alan W. Black - Wikipedia en.wikipedia.org. Checked 15 October 2026.
  2. Festival Speech Synthesis System - Table of Contents cstr.ed.ac.uk. Checked 15 October 2026.
  3. Festival cstr.ed.ac.uk. Checked 15 October 2026.
  4. Alan W Black cs.cmu.edu. Checked 15 October 2026.
  5. ISCA Services services.isca-speech.org. Checked 15 October 2026.
  6. GitHub - festvox/datasets-CMU_Wilderness: CMU Wilderness Multilingual Speech Dataset github.com. Checked 15 October 2026.
  7. Alan Black | Carnegie Mellon University School of Computer Science exec.cs.cmu.edu. Checked 15 October 2026.