Working with Praat


Praat is a free software package for doing acoustic phonetics. You will use it to listen to and transcribe sound files for the phonetics assignments. It will also give you a chance to see the acoustic spectra of the sounds you'll be listening to and transcribing. You can use Praat on any of the computers in the Linguistics cluster, or you can download it for free onto your own computer. We recommend the latter.

How to use Praat

1. Open up Praat. You can close the window entitled "Praat picture". You'll be working with the "Praat objects" window (it will look like the window to the right here.)

2. Go to "read" on the pull down menu, and pull down to "Read from file" and open the sound file you want to work with. The name of the file will then appear in the left column of the Praat objects window.

3. In the Praat objects window, select the name of the file and click "edit" in the column on the right. This will open a window showing the sound file. There will be an amplitude display on top and a spectrogram on the bottom (as illustrated below).

You might have to zoom in (using the little "in" button in the lower left hand corner) to get the spectrogram to display.

4. If you click in any of the three bars at the bottom of the window, the sound will play. The bottom bar plays the whole file, the middle bar plays what's in the window, and the top bar plays whatever you select. You can select segments by dragging your mouse on the spectrogram itself.

5. Familiarize yourself with the relation between the acoustic signal and what you hear by highlighting different segments of the spectrogram and listening to them.