Praat & and Praat scripting
Praat is a "program for doing phonetics by computer". If you
plan to work with speech corpora (either already existing corpora or
corpora you created yourself by running phonetic experiments or
sociolinguistics interviews) you most likely will end up working either
with Praat (available for all operating systems) or Xwaves
(Unix-based). This page provides links to tutorials for Praat and Praat
scripting (a way to automate everything you want to do in Praat).
Praat can be downloaded for free from http://www.praat.org.
Tutorials
The following links to tutorials are recommended for beginners
(if you know of other resources, please send and email to the corpus TA). More advanced users can use
the help system that comes with the Praat program. The Praat program
also contains a scripting tutorial, which, however, is hard to
understand for people without prior experience in scripting or
programming languages.
- The tutorial by Pascal van Lieshout provides an
excellent introduction into most of the functions of Praat except for
Praat scripting.
- The handout of a short Praat
scripting tutorial (last update 04/20/04) by Florian Jaeger is
available along with scripts referred to in the tutorial (the scripts
are alphabetically ordered in according to their appearance in the
tutorial.
- There also is a world-wide Praat
user support list with lots of useful hints, freely available
scripts and endless advice.
- A local support email list for Praat users at Stanford is
currently being created by the phonetics TA (Lev Blumenfeld).
Available add-ons to Praat
If you are conducting a lot of research that involves analysis
of vowels, you will find the Akustyc package by
Bartlomiej Plichta, Michigan State University most helpful. It is a
freely available add-on to Praat intended to easily automate vowel
analysis on many files.