![]() We’ll get into what these functions do in a later workshop Some things can be performed on Sound files, other are only done on TextGrids. This side will display buttons for many functions available to whatever Praat object(s) is/are selected. The utility of the Rename, Copy, and Remove buttons is self-explanatory, and the Inspect and Info buttons show various properties and information about the selected objects.įinally, on the right side of the window we see the dynamic menu. ![]() These are “fixed” because they are always there and available, regardless of what is in the list of objects. In this case, object number 1 is a “Sound”" that is named “hello”.Īt the bottom of the objects window you will find the fixed buttons. For each object, the objects window displays what kind of object it is, followed by its name. As mentioned previously, these objects can take several forms, and Figure 1 above showed just four of them: Sound, TextGrid, Formant, and Intensity. This is where you can see the names of the Praat objects currently in memory. Moving down the objects window, next is the list of objects. I almost always save audio as a WAV file and everything else as a text file.Īs you can see, there are many other options, just in creating, loading, and saving files, but these basic options will serve you just fine. Save: This menu allows you to save files in one of many formats, depending on the kind of Praat object. So if you’re working with a sound file longer than a couple minutes, it might be better to open it as a LongSound file. While Praat can handle pretty long sound files, but they take up a lot of memory. Open: This is where you can load files already stored on your computer, such as a recording downloaded from the internet or some other Praat-specific file you’ve created in the past. I have never needed to use any of the other options and submenus in this menu. ![]() New: This is where you can create new objects from scratch, such as recording a mono or stereo sound. Here are what each of the menu items do and the ones I use: I say that because while the basic functions are clear, I am not familiar with most of the options in each of these menus. This means that if Praat crashes, everything in your object window is lost. Strictly speaking these are contained in your computer’s memory and are not automatically saved. Praat objects can be of many different types, such as Sound, TextGrid, or Formant (we’ll get to these later). It is where your Praat objects will appear. The window on the left is called the object window. I can’t teach everything about Praat scripting in this class, but I hope to introduce a few basic tools. But Praat scripting is even more of a black box than the regular software, with even fewer tutorials online. Say you have a recording half an hour long and you want to extract the duration of all the vowels-a script will take care of that in seconds. This is especially useful if you have a task that you need to do over and over. It actually has its own scripting language, to help automate any function it can do. While the software itself may not be pretty, the visualizations it can produce are professional quality. This is especially true of phoneticians, phonologists, and sociolinguists. Nearly every linguist has used Praat at some point. There are some definite pros for using Praat: With that said, Praat is still a highly sophisticated piece of software under-the-hood. Recent versions seem more stable, but there’s always a small chance of it crashing. It would often crash without warning, meaning you’d lose all your work. In the past, Praat has been notoriously unstable. This is part of the reason we wanted to put together these workshops, with a detailed set of instructions, so that you can use it to your advantage in your own research. There is help within the software itself, but it’s not easy to use. And-this one still boggles my mind-no one has written a decent tutorial. The documentation online is very brief and never has enough detail. It’s not the easiest software to learn how to use. Everything is hidden behind menus and buttons and everything takes a lot of clicks. It is also not the most intuitive software. The icon, which is supposed to look like an ear and lips, probably hasn’t changed since the 90’s when the software was first created. Praat is not the most visually appealing program. I’ll be the first to say that Praat definitely has some negative aspects: In this workshop series, we can only show you how to do a very small number of things because we don’t even know all the ins and outs of Praat, but hopefully you’ll be able to leave the workshop with some skills yourself. Written and maintained by Paul Boersma and David Weenick, Praat has tons of features and can do a very wide range of functions for processing speech. Praat (Dutch for “talk”) is a free computer software package for the scientific analysis of speech and phonetics.
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |
AuthorWrite something about yourself. No need to be fancy, just an overview. ArchivesCategories |