Speak and Unspeak with PRAAT
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Speak and unSpeak with PRAAT By Paul Boersma and Vincent van Heuven Introduction PRAAT is a computer program for analysing, By the Goodies Editor, Rob Goedemans synthesizing, and manipulating speech. It has been developed since 1992 by Paul Boersma and David Many linguists use recorded speech in their research. Weenink at the Institute of Phonetic Sciences of the In descriptive work, visual representations of such University of Amsterdam. There are versions for most recordings (mostly oscillograms) are often annotated of the common operating systems: Macintosh, Win- with IPA symbols and other labels, and then used to dows, Linux, and several Unix workstations (Solaris, illustrate a phenomenon or defend a certain position Silicon Graphics, Hewlett-Packard). By September regarding the nature of some phonetic or phonologi- 2001, there were more than 5,000 registered users in cal property of the language in question. In phonetic 99 countries. and psychophysical research some parameter of the recorded speech (like tempo or intensity) is often altered, after which the new sound thus obtained is PRAAT, a system for doing phonetics used in an experiment to test the sensitivity of the by computer human ear, or brain, to certain speech properties. By Paul Boersma The introduction of the computer has brought about a virtual revolution in the linguistic sciences with respect to the usage of speech recordings. A lab 1. Analysing speech with P full of cumbersome machinery has now been replaced RAAT PRAAT allows you to record a sound with your by one PC, Mac or workstation, on which anyone who microphone or any other audio input device, or to puts his mind to it can record, annotate and modify read a sound from a sound ®le on disk. You will then speech with some simple commands or a few be able to have a look `inside' this sound. The upper mouseclicks. Even the calculation of some speech half of the sound window (see ®gure 1) will show you parameters that were rather complicated to obtain in a visible representation of the sound (the wave form). the past (like pitch and spectral analysis) but fre- The lower half will show you several acoustic analy- quently used in phonetic research nonetheless, are ses: the spectrogram (a representation of the amount of now often just one or two mouseclicks away. high and low frequencies available in the signal) is As a result, a growing number of colleagues ®nd painted in shades of grey; the pitch contour (the use for ®les with speech sounds in their linguistic frequency of periodicity) is drawn as a cyan curve; explorations. The needs of this group are served by a and formant contours (the main constituents of the rather small number of software packages designed spectrogram) are plotted as red dots. for the representation, annotation and analysis of PRAAT is most often used with speech sounds, in speech (and much more in many cases). In my which case the pitch contour is associated with the opinion, one of these stands out in many ways. It is vibration of the vocal folds and the formant contours called ``PRAAT''; the imperative form of to speak in are associated with resonances in the vocal tract. But Dutch. Since this package is rapidly gaining in the use of PRAAT is certainly not limited to speech popularity, we have decided to devote some attention sounds: musicians and bio-acousticians use it for the to it in this issue. First, one of the authors, Paul analysis of sounds produced by ¯utes, drums, crick- Boersma, introduces the package and outlines its ets, or whales, and the interpretation of the three impressive functionality. Then, an experienced user, analyses will change accordingly. Vincent van Heuven, highlights some of the advan- The Sound window allows you to zoom in for tages and disadvantages of using PRAAT in everyday more detail, to scroll to the places that you are phonetic research. It is my sincere hope that these two goodies will convince even more linguists to download PRAAT Paul Boersma, Institute of Phonetic Sciences, University of and experiment with it a little. They will see that Amsterdam, Herengracht 338, 1016 CG Amsterdam, incorporating, for example, some oscillograms of The Netherlands, [email protected] minimal pairs in their work is as easy as ABC. Their Vincent van Heuven, Universiteit Leiden Centre for Linguistics publications will undoubtedly be the better (and the (ULCL), P.O. Box 9515, 2300 RA Leiden, The Netherlands, livelier) for it. [email protected] Glot International Vol. 5, No. 9/10, November/December 2001 (341±347) 341 Ó Blackwell Publishers Ltd. 2001, 108 Cowley Road, Oxford, UK and 250 Main Street, Malden MA 02148, USA Goodies Glot International, Volume 5, Number 9/10, November/December 2001 342 Figure 1. Praat's sound window. interested in, to set a time cursor or select a time pitch contour to be saved, printed, or converted into stretch, and to listen to the parts of the sound that something else. you are viewing or selecting. You can easily query all the important properties of the analyses, e.g. obtain the average pitch value inside the selected time 2. Annotating speech with PRAAT stretch. You can turn the analyses into separate PRAAT is used by many linguists (phoneticians, objects (independent from the original sound), which phonologists, syntacticians) to label and segment their is handy for further processing, e.g. it allows the speech recordings. You can make transcriptions and Figure 2. Praat's annotation window. Goodies Glot International, Volume 5, Number 9/10, November/December 2001 343 annotations on multiple levels simultaneously (see the In ®gure 3, the impatient-sounding question ``can you three levels in ®gure 2), in a window that typically time it?'', with an original ®nal high rise, has been also shows visible representations of the sound, the converted into a slightly whining command. The spectrogram, and perhaps the pitch contour. PRAAT same window allows you to modify relative durations supports an easy use of special symbols in annota- within this utterance. In this way, you can change the tions, including nearly all symbols de®ned by the intonation and stress patterns of the utterance, which International Phonetic Association (such as the h is useful when creating stimuli for research into the symbol, typed as ``\te'', in ®gure 2). perception of prosody. 3. Synthesizing speech with PRAAT 5. Graphical capabilities of PRAAT PRAAT is not a text-to-speech system: you cannot PRAAT comes with a separate Picture window into type in an English sentence and have the program which you can draw your sounds, pitch contours, read it aloud. But you can generate many types of spectrograms, and any other data types. You can add sounds with PRAAT. First, you can use formulas to text (several fonts, many special symbols, several generate simple sounds like sine waves or white sizes, any rotation), lines (several colours, any widths, noise from scratch, or to generate more complicated several styles), circles/ellipses/rectangles (®lled or sounds from other sounds. Second, you can create outlined), and several types of markers along and sounds from other types of data, e.g. you can turn a inside your drawings. Figure 4, for instance, shows pitch contour in a pulse train. Third, you can do the modi®ed pitch contour of ®gure 3, with appro- source-®lter synthesis: from stylized pitch, intensity, priate vertical text to its left, and a comment added and formant contours that you can build from above it. scratch, you can create speech-like sounds. Fourth, The Picture window is designed for producing you can perform articulatory synthesis: from a speci- publication-quality graphics for your articles and ®cation of timed muscle contractions, Praat will dissertations. From this window, you can print to compute the resulting sound. Fifth, you can create any printer (PostScript, Macintosh, Windows) and sounds from other sounds by a variety of ®ltering save your drawings as EPS ®les (best quality, but and enhancement techniques. works with PostScript printers and PDF creators only), WMF ®les (Windows), or PICT ®les (Macin- tosh). All of these can be easily imported into your 4. Manipulating speech with PRAAT word processor. The Macintosh and Windows ver- A specialized manipulation window allows you to sions support the graphical clipboard as well, so that stylize and modify the pitch contour of an utterance. you can use simple copy-and-paste to move PRAAT Figure 3. Praat's manipulation window. Goodies Glot International, Volume 5, Number 9/10, November/December 2001 344 pictures to your word processor, if you have no use modelling and extensive high-level statistics (prin- for PostScript quality. cipal-component analysis, discriminant analysis, multidimensional scaling). 6. The PRAAT scripting language In most parts of the world, slavery was abolished in the 19th century, but it is not unusual to see phoneticians measure the pitch values of 1500 vowels by hand. You would probably want to replace such work by an automated procedure that, say, loops over all the sound ®les that reside in a certain directory or over all the segments marked ``u'' in a vowel annotation. Such things can easily be performed by the PRAAT scripting language, which is a general-purpose programming language with special capabilities for simulating menu choices and button presses in the PRAAT program. Many people use this language for all their analyses, tabulations, statistics (there are special functions for computing levels of signi®cance in t, v2,orFtests), and complicated pictures. In fact, you can use PRAAT as a general drawing program: ®gure 4 shows a PRAAT script that draws the complicated ®gure at the top of the Picture window.