Praat

The Praat Book

This book is about Praat, a free computer software package for speech analysis in phonetics. It was designed, and continues to be developed, by Paul Boersma and David Weenink of the University of Amsterdam. The program supports speech synthesis, including articulatory synthesis. This book is originated by the original work by Will Styler - Using Praat for Linguistic Research, version: 1.8.1 (December 25, 2017). In this way, throughout the chapters of this book, the main idea is to provide an instructional guide or manual that can be used in a traditional classroom, an accredited or respected institution, a home-school environment, as part of a Wikiversity course, or for self-learning. This book follows Wikibooks:What is Wikibooks? documentation policies.

Index

• Version History
• Introduction
  • Versions
  • Other Resources
  • Getting and Installing Praat
  • Using this guide
• About Praat
  • Praat Windows
• Recording Sounds
  • Mono vs. Stereo Recording
• Opening and Saving Files
  • Opening Files
  • Working with longer sound files
  • Saving Files
• Phonetic Measurement and Analysis in Praat
  • Working with Praat Waveforms and Spectrograms
  • Pulling out a smaller section of the file for analysis
  • Adjusting the Spectrogram settings
  • Narrowband vs. Broadband Spectrograms
  • Measuring Duration
  • Measuring Voice Onset Time (VOT)
  • Examining and measuring F0/Pitch
  • Measuring F0 from a single cycle
  • Viewing Pitch via a narrowband spectrogram
  • Using Praat’s Pitch Tracking
  • Improving Pitch tracking by changing the Pitch Settings
  • Scripting: Creating a Pitch Object
  • Getting Maximum, Minimum, and Average pitch for a section of speech
  • Measuring Pulses, Jitter, Shimmer, and Harmonics-to-noise ratio
  • Measuring Formants
  • Using the Formant tools in the Editor window
  • Improving Formant Finding results
  • Scripting Only: Formant Objects
  • Measuring Intensity/Amplitude
  • Units of Intensity (dB vs. Pascal)
  • Working with Spectra
  • Taking a spectral slice
  • Measuring Harmonic Amplitude, Frequency
  • Measuring Creakiness and Breathiness using Spectral Tilt
  • Measuring Nasality using A1-P0
  • Measuring Spectral Center of Gravity
• Creating and manipulating sound Files in Praat
  • Creating sounds from Formula
  • Working with Stereo Files (Converting, Combining, and Extracting channels)
  • Converting a single stereo file into a single mono file
  • Extracting a stereo file’s two channels into separate mono files
  • Combining two mono sounds into one stereo sound
  • Cropping, Copying, Splicing and Pasting
  • Sampling rates and Resampling
  • Filtering Sounds
  • Low-pass filtering
  • High-pass filtering
  • Band-pass (notch) filtering
  • Manipulating Spectral Tilt
  • Pitch Manipulation (To Manipulation…)
  • Matching the pitch tracks of two sounds
  • Manipulating Duration (Slowing Down and Speeding Up Sounds)
  • Modifying Duration by Script
  • Scaling and Matching Intensity
  • Concatenating Sounds
  • Combining Sounds
  • Formula Modification: Waveform addition, subtraction and so much more
  • Synthesizing Sounds from scratch
  • Source-Filter Vowel Resynthesis
• Exporting images for use and publication
• Creating Complex Displays
• Overlaying Plots
• Multiple Plots in the Picture Window
• Annotating Sound Files (Praat TextGrids)
• Using Log Files
• Scripting in Praat
  • What is Praat scripting?
  • Praat Scripting Alternatives for common tasks
• Praat’s scripting tutorials
  • Praat scripts vs. Editor scripts
  • Working with Scripts
• Opening and running a Praat script
• Making (and removing) Menu Shortcuts for scripts
• “The Praat script I downloaded won’t run!”
• Creating a new script
• Using other text editors
• Filenames
• A Note on Praat Script Commands
• How to magically write a Praat script (using the Praat “history” function)
• Writing your first single-command script
• Scripts with Variables
• About the Praat Scripting Language
• ‘for’ loops
• ‘if’ statements
• ‘while’ loops
• Forms
• goto and label
• /Commented lines (#)/
• Scaling scripts up: nowarn, noprogress, and avoiding the editor window
• Useful tips
• Everything Else
• In defense of Code Cannibalism
• Closing Remarks on Praat scripting
• Advanced Techniques
• Getting Amplitude Envelopes and AM Demodulation in Praat
• Breaking the “Sound” barrier: Working with analytical “sounds” in Praat
• Conclusion