The development of ToRI is financially supported by the Netherlands Organization of Scientific Research (NWO), 2002-2006, filenumber 355-75-004. The webpages are financially supported by the University of Amsterdam, Onderwijs Innovatie Fonds (OIF, Innovation of Teaching Grants) and the Stichting Spraaktechnologie. Webmasters are Rob Goedemans, who is responsible for the design of the webpages, and Jan de Jong, who is responsible for processing the sound examples and designing the exercises.
The ToRI system was originally inspired by the Transcription of Dutch Intonation, ToDI (Gussenhoven et al., 2003, http://todi.let.kun.nl/ToDI/home.htm). In its turn, ToDI was partly based on ToBI (Tones and Break Indices (Beckman et al., 2005; http://www.ling.ohio-state.edu/~tobi/)), but differs from ToBI in that, among other things, no Break Indices are included (Gussenhoven, 2005:122). ToRI uses symbols as they appear in ToDI, but in its turn differs considerably from ToDI for language-specific reasons. Unlike ToDI, ToRI presents not only forms, but also communicative functions of pitch accents and other pitch phenomena. For literature on ToDI and on ToBI-like systems and websites, see Literature.
Corpora of spoken Russian used for ToRI are the following:
The Odé (1989) corpus consists of twelve minutes of spontaneous speech by two female and three male speakers, and three minutes of quasi-spontaneous and read-aloud speech by one female and five male speakers, between 20-70 years of age. For more details see Odé (1989:135ff.).
The Odé (2004, 2005, 2006, 2008) recordings were made using a Marantz Professional CDR300 CD-recorder and an Edirol R-09 with a Sony electret stereo directional microphone. Speakers were female and male speakers between 20-70 years of age.
The recordings of the St. Petersburg corpus were made in January-June, 2002, with a one week interval between the spontaneous and read speech recordings. Speakers were five females and five males between 20-50 years of age. Speech was recorded with microphones AKG HSC200 SR and mixer Behringer 802A.
The author wishes to express her gratitude to the following linguists, intonologists and phoneticians who have largely inspired and commented her work: (in alphabetical order) Lidija Bondarko†, Johanneke Caspers, Carlos Gussenhoven, Eric de Haard, Vincent van Heuven, Roza Kasatkina, Leonid Kasatkin, Sandro Kodzasov, Tat'iana Nikolaeva, Louis Pols, Margje Post and Nataliia Svetozarova. She especially thanks Carlos Gussenhoven for the many useful discussions on defining the Russian pitch accents. Finally, a special word of deep gratitude is for Nataliia Svetozarova, who patiently and repeatedly assisted in evaluating the pitch accents in sound examples and exercises, and in defining the communicative functions of the pitch accents. She also contributed to translating the texts of ToRI for the Russian version.