These datasets are used to synthesize degraded speech by convolving clean recordings with room impulse responses (RIRs) and mixing with environmental noise at varying SNRs.

ESC-50

2,000 environmental audio recordings across 50 classes. Lightweight and commonly used.

HuggingFace:

from datasets import load_dataset
dataset = load_dataset("ashraq/esc50")

Kaggle:

import kagglehub
path = kagglehub.dataset_download("mmoreaux/environmental-sound-classification-50")
print("Path:", path)

Room Impulse Response and Noise Database (OpenSLR #28)

Large collection of real and simulated RIRs and noise recordings.

Page: OpenSLR RIRs

wget https://openslr.trmal.net/resources/28/rirs_noises.zip
unzip rirs_noises.zip -d rirs_noises

DEMAND

Diverse Environments Multichannel Acoustic Noise Database — 18 real noise environments.

TARGET_DIR="/path/to/your/datasets/demand"
mkdir -p "$TARGET_DIR"

curl -L -o "$TARGET_DIR/demand.zip" \
  https://www.kaggle.com/api/v1/datasets/download/chrisfilo/demand

unzip "$TARGET_DIR/demand.zip" -d "$TARGET_DIR"
rm "$TARGET_DIR/demand.zip"

VGG Sound

200+ categories of audio-visual events extracted from YouTube. More than 200k 10-second clips.

Kaggle: VGG Sound

import kagglehub
path = kagglehub.dataset_download("codebreaker619/vggsound")
print("Path:", path)