Corpora@Stanford

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.

• Akustyk is available at: http://bartus.org/akustyk/.