Praat Tutorial and Resources Jean Philippe Goldman February 2004 The purpose of this document is to give an overview of Praat its features its online 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 analyses 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 users group It s free and available for most platforms Many tutorials exist and the discussion group is very active see resources below It has been designed for both beginners easy interface many default options to learn by trying searchable manual various possibilities of analysis manipulation and labeling and expert users logging of every action for easy batch scripting or resource for advanced application development Quick Tutorial Praat s layout is based on objects Any object sound pitch curve matrix group of strings can be loaded created saved queried modified or used 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 analyses 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 Start Praat Praat starts with two windows Praat objects and Praat picture you can close the second 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 selected 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 Shepard tone OK The sound you ve just created is now in the list of objects type name As it is selected 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 present though they might be disabled if nothing is selected or present in the list These functions are common too all objects whatever the type With them you may Rename an object Rename Duplicate an object Copy Delete an object Remove Get the results from various queries on an object Info Browse 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 selected object it won t appear if several objects of different types are selected at the same time Figure 3 Praat objects window with Sound objects Record a Sound With a microphone you can record a sound or some speech with Menu New Record Mono Sound A window SoundRecorder opens see below Plug your microphone Press Record to start recording You should see a real time meter in green yellow red while you speak If not check your general recording settings 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 else if you like then Close The sound appears now in the object list Figure 4 SoundRecorder window Load a Sound From Read menu Read from file Praat reads whatever it can recognize For sound files WAV AIFF non compressed AIFC NeXT Sun au and NIST files are supported See www praat org 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 select it by clicking on it if it s not selected see figure 3 Here is a quick description of the dynamic buttons Sound Help opens the Help window with many useful information Edit opens an Editor window with signal and various acoustic analyses We ll describe it in the next section Play plays the sound Press the Esc key to stop playing Draw opens a local menu with options It is useful to plot picture in the window we ve closed You can give a try Query opens a local menu with many options Try some of them like Get duration An Info window will open to display results Try also Get nearest zero crossing 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 Reverse the sound file try it and Play Notice that modifications are done with the object Reverse 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 clicked Formula or see www praat org manual Formulas html Annotate To TextGrid create a labeling object see TextGrid object section The Analyze section 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 pulses Spectrum deals with all kind of spectral analyses spectrum spectrogram wavelets Formant LPC creates formant contours and linear predictive filter coefficients To Intensity calculates to intensity contour When you try these tools notice that the dynamic buttons change Click the Edit dynamic button to see results Reselect the original Sound object to try another one The Manipulation section 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 sequence of points in time representing the glottal pulse Most of the buttons in the Synthesize section are self explicit and create Sound objects from the original one s You ll find here tools to extract a part to resample to filter see Filter tutorial in Help Menu or to concatenate sounds