Praat Tutorial and Resources
Jean-Philippe Goldman
February 2004
The purpo of this document is to give an overview of Praat, its features, its on-line resources and some quick steps to start using it.
What is Praat?
Praat is an open-software tool for speech signal edition and labeling, as well as for various acoustic analys (spectral, formant, pitch, intensity) and prosodic manipulation. It has also some abilities to plot figures, build Optimality-Theory grammars, make articulatory synthesis, simulate feed-forward neural networks and make discriminative statistics. Paul Boersma and David Weenink from the Institute of Phonetic Sciences, University of Amsterdam (www.fon.hum.uva.nl), have been developing Praat for almost 10 years and are still very active (frequent software updates and quick answers on praat-urs group). It's free and available for most platforms. Many tutorials exist and the discussion group is very active (e resources below).
It has been designed for both beginners (easy interface, many default options to learn by trying, archable manual, various possibilities of analysis, manipulation and labeling) and expert urs (logging of every action for easy batch scripting, or resource for advanced application development\).
Quick Tutorial我的家乡巫山美
Praat's layout is bad on 'objects'. Any object (sound, pitch curve, matrix, group of strings,...) can be loaded, created, saved, queried, modified or ud to create another object (of the same type or not).
General information about this tutorial:
This tutorial will teach you how to create or load sounds, to make first analys and to label them. Praat needs no right-click button nor double-click and has no contextual menus. Follow the instructions in red.
Figure 1 Praat icon
高中英语学习策略Start Praat
Praat starts with two windows: Praat objects, and Praat picture (you can clo the cond one as we will not draw pictures here). The "Praat objects" window is the main one. It lists the objects in memory. Menus and buttons are dynamic, i.e. they may change (appear, disappear or be disabled) according to the lected objects. When it's just started, Praat has no objects in its list, therefore the list is empty, the buttons
(bottom) are yet disabled, and the 'Write' menu (4th) is empty.
Figure 2 Praat windows at start
Create a Sound
Execute Menu 'New' > Sound > Create Sound from > OK梦见家里漏雨
The sound you’ve just created is now in the list of objects (type + name). As it is lected (grey), many buttons appear on the right, the buttons at bottom are now enabled, and the Write menu displays options.
In fact the 5 buttons at the bottom are called the fixed buttons (they are always prent though they might be disabled if nothing is lected or prent in the list). The functions are common too all objects whatever the type. With them, you may:
Rename an object (Rename…)
Duplicate an object (Copy…)广东汤谱大全
Delete an object (Remove)
Get the results from various queries on an object (Info)ve眼霜
Brow the internal data of an object (Inspect)
The buttons on the right of the list are the dynamic buttons. We'll go through most of them. The first one is always a Help button referring to the type of the lected object (it won't appear if veral objects of different types are lected at the same time).外阴长疙瘩
Figure 3 "Praat objects" window with "Sound" objects
Record a Sound
怎么复制粘贴With a microphone, you can record a sound or some speech with Menu > New > Record A window 'SoundRecorder' opens (e below). Plug your microphone. Press Record to start recording. You should e a real time meter in green/yellow/red while you speak. If not, check your general recording ttings. Press Stop to stop recording. Play to listen to your recording. You can start over if you are not satisfied. When finished, press Save to list: (change the name 'sound' to something el if you like) then Clo. The sound appears now in the object list.
Figure 4 SoundRecorder window
Load a Sound
From Read menu> Read , Praat reads whatever it can recognize. For sound files, WAV, AIFF, non-compresd AIFC, NeXT/Sun (.au) and NIST files are supported. See www.praat/manual/Sound_files_3__Files_that_Praat_can_read.html
Raw (headerless) files can also be read with other options in this Read menu.
Sound Object
Once you have a Sound object in your list (created, recorded or loaded), lect it by clicking on it if it's not lected (e figure 3). Here is a quick description of the dynamic buttons:
Sound Help opens the Help window with many uful information
Edit opens an Editor window with signal and various acoustic analys. We’ll describe it in the next ction
Play plays the sound. Press the Esc key to stop playing.
Draw- opens a local menu with options. It is uful to plot picture in the window we've clod. You can give a try.
Query- opens a local menu with many options. Try some of them, like An Info window will open to display results. Try also Get nearest A form window asks for a time value. In this form, notice the Help button referring to the right page in the Manual. Try Info fixed button (at bottom); the info window will give you all the possible queries on the whole file.
Modify- allows to Rever the sound file (try it and Play). Notice that modifications are done with the object. Rever it once more to get back to original sound.
Modify- > Formula. See Formulas tutorial for more help (from Help menu, or Help button once you or e www.praat/manual/Formulas.html).
Annotate- > To TextGrid… create a labeling object (e TextGrid object ction)
The Analyze ction or submenu is a group of dynamic buttons that create new objects of different types from the sound object after one acoustic analysis among various explicit possibilities:
Periodicity- deals with pitch contour: Pitch analysis, Harmonicity, Glottal puls Spectrum- deals with
口红怎么做的all kind of spectral analys (spectrum, spectrogram, wavelets) Formant&LPC- creates formant contours and (linear predictive) filter coefficients
To Intensity calculates to intensity contour
When you try the tools, notice that the dynamic buttons change. Click the Edit dynamic button to e results. Relect the original Sound object to try another one. The Manipulation ction contains a unique button:
To Manipulation:creates a Manipulation object, which contains the original sound, a pitch tier, a duration tier and a PointProcess (i.e. a quence of points in time) reprenting the glottal pul.
Most of the buttons in the Synthesize ction are lf-explicit and create Sound objects from the original one(s). You'll find here tools to extract a part, to resample, to filter (e Filter tutorial in Help Menu), or to concatenate sounds.
Edit Window
As a Sound object is lected, press Edit, a new window opens. In the top half, e the speech signal in black as well as the glottal puls. The bottom half shows the analys: pitch in blue, intens
ity in yellow (or green), formants in red and spectrogram in background. Each of the five analys (the four and the puls) has its own menu, all starting with a ‘Show/Hide’ switch and a ‘Settings…’ option.
The three bars below the analysis pane are ‘play’ buttons. You can click them to play the sound and e a real time cursor (vertical bar moving from left to right) on the signal. The top cursor bar is divided in two equal ctions as the main cursor or marker is t by default right in the middle of the file when Edit window opens. Figures indicate durations in conds. The cond bar (window bar) reprents the part of the file that is shown in the window. The third is the entire file (full bar). The last two are now the same as Edit window shows all the file when it opens.
Select a part in the middle of the signal by a click-and-drag on signal or analysis pane. The lection appears in transparent pink. Now the top bar should be divided in three ctions: before the lection, the lection itlf, after the lection. Play them individually. You can expand or shrink this lection by pressing-and-holding the shift button before you click the signal pane or make another lection.
Now look at the bottom left corner, you e four handy buttons to help you modify the window ttings
all shows the entire file
in let you zoom in by a factor of two (i.e. you’ll e half of the current window)
out zooms out by a factor of two
l adjusts the display window to the lection
Try them. As the window displays a portion of the signal, notice how the window bar and the full bar change. You can still play what is before the window, after the window and the complete sound.
Figure 5 Sound Edit window
As you click on the signal, e in blue, on the left of the sound, the value of the waveform. If you click on the analysis pane, you may have up to three vertical scales depending on the number of shown analys:
frequency on the left. It shows the value in Hz of the marker in the frequency domain (as long as spectrum or formant analysis is shown)
pitch in blue on the right. marker value as well as minimum and maximum. Note that the marker value is the pitch estimation of the sound at that moment, i.e. on the blue curve, not at the marker position which can be anywhere in the pane.
intensity in green. It might be either side, or even inside the analysis pane.
Here is briefly what you can do with the other menus:
File: extracts parts of the signal to the object list or to a file
Edit: the usual Undo/Cut/Copy/Paste menu for signal edition. Revers and ts to silence options too.
