A Practical Guide to PRAAT1

Let’s do Phonetics with Computers

Atanu SahaSchool of Languages and LinguisticsJadavpur University

KMI workshop/Dr. B.R. Ambedkar University/7-9 Aug’14/SAHA

1Everything about PRAAT can be found here http://www.fon.hum.uva.nl/praat/

1

2

Contents

0.1 Introduction . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 30.2 What is Praat? . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 30.3 What do you need? . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 4

0.3.1 Installation guide . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 40.4 Let’s get started . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 50.5 Annotating the file . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 8

0.5.1 Phoneme Tier . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 80.5.2 Morpheme Tier . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 80.5.3 Meaning . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 9

0.6 Using different scripts . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 90.7 Analysis . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 90.8 Familiarizing with the sounds . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 100.9 Your Task . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 11

0.1 Introduction

Welcome to the training of PRAAT Software!

This handout has three parts. The first part will run you through the intro-duction and the installation parts of the software. The second part will bethe demonstration of the software and the third part will be implementationand familiarizing with some basic sounds.

0.2 What is Praat?

PRAAT is a software specially designed for Linguists who want to carry outresearch in acoustic phonetics and possess a sound knowledge of Computer.It is developed by Paul Boersma and David Weenink of the department ofPhonetic Sciences of University of Amsterdam. Praat helps us to do the anal-ysis of speech. The analysis involves spectral analysis (spectrograms), pitch

3

4 CONTENTS

analysis, formant analysis,intensity analysis, jitter, shimmer, voice breaks,excitation pattern. The other utility of doing Praat is to do a speech synthe-sis.Praat is an open source software which is compatible with all the threemajor platforms i.e. Windows, Linuz and Macintosh.

0.3 What do you need?

The system requirement for Praat is the following. Download the requiredversion of Praat according to your operating system availble with your sys-tem. The software comes in two versions for a windows based system, a 32bit and a 64 bit version.

0.3.1 Installation guide

After Downloading the software. Do the following, extract the files by usingan unzip package. Then double click on the icon and Praat is ready to beused now.

Software icon

0.4 Let’s get started

There are two components in this software. Praat objects which we will beneeding for opening and analyzing the sound files and a Praat picture windowwhich will allow us to draw it and then it can be printed or published.

0.4. LET’S GET STARTED 5

Preliminary Window of Praat

We also need to have some pre-recorded sound files in our computers. Praatsupports various types of sound files. The most common among these are.wav and .mp3 files. The first thing that we have to do is to click on the readfrom file option.

opening a sound file

After clicking this option it asks for the source of sound file where it is lo-cated. Click on the desired file you want. Then select the soundfile and clickon annoate to text grid. A separate window will pop up and ask for tierdetails.

6 CONTENTS

Preparing a Textgrid file

Once the text grid file is created, select both the sound file and the text gridfile together and then click on view and edit button.

Textgrid file

0.5 Annotating the file

In our case I have taken a word ’flower’ being pronounced by a speaker. Ihave created three tiers 1. a phoneme tier b. a morpheme/word tier c. a tier

0.6. USING DIFFERENT SCRIPTS 7

for meaning. Out of these three tiers meaning is a point tier.

0.5.1 Phoneme Tier

In this tier I have chunked the phonemes or di-phons or tri-phons as per theiroccurences. In this case the phonemes are ph,l, r and a tri-phon awa. Youneed to be careful with the intervals and create the exact boundary. Thisrequires a lot of practice and familiarity with the sound patterns.

0.5.2 Morpheme Tier

In this tier the full word or the morpheme phlawar is written.

0.5.3 Meaning

In this case the word is flower so I have given the meaning in English orthog-raphy in this tier.

Annotated Textgrid file

0.6 Using different scripts

Praat allows multiingual scripts at the same text grid file. You have to makesure that the font has to be a unicode font and it must be pre-installed in

8 CONTENTS

your computers.

0.7 Analysis

Once our text grid file is ready we can do various things. We can see theinformation related to pitch, duration, formant, intensity, pulses and more.We can also put two text grid files in a parallel manner say the words penand ben and see that what’s the nature of phonemes /p/ and /b/ in thesetwo files. We can record our own sounds and see how they look like. Lin-guists use these text grid files to analyze languages and the sound systemsof a given language.

0.8 Familiarizing with the sounds

We can visualize the sounds by looking at the spectograms which Praat pro-vides us. Below I have shown two images for some vowel sounds and fewconsonants. The images are taken from Peter Ladefoged’s book Vowels andConsonants: An Introduction to the sounds of Language first published in2001.

Vowels

0.9. YOUR TASK 9

consonants

So is not it interesting?Everything is boring unless you enjoy doing it.

0.9 Your Task

Some sound files will be provided to you and start doing them when you areasked to by following instructions from this handout and the praat manual.

ReferencesLadefoged, Peter. 2001. Vowels and Consonants: An Introduction to thesounds of Language. Blackwell Publishing.

Boersma,Paul;David Weenink.Praat.retrived from http://www.fon.hum.uva.nl/praatas on 1/8/14.

All the best with Praat!!

If you have any further queries regarding this handout kindly write to meatanu.jnu@gmail.com/ atanu.saha@school.jdvu.ac.in.