Speech research is a complex endeavor, as reflected in the numerous tools and specialized languages the modern researcher needs to learn. These tools, while adequate for what they have been designed for, are difficult to customize or extend in new directions, even though this is often required. We feel this situation can be improved and propose a new scripting language, MUSE, designed explicitly for speech research, in order to facilitate exploration of new ideas. MUSE is designed to support many modes of research from interactive speech analysis through compute-intensive speech understanding systems, and has facilities for automating some of the more difficult requirements of speech tools: user interactivity, distributed computation, and caching. In this paper we describe the design of the MUSE language and our current prototype MUSE interpreter.