Praat: Doing Phonetics by Computer

Abstract

The following gives you an idea of the features of the Praat program. The links take you into the web copy of the manual. The same manual is also available from Praat's Help menus, in which case you can see the pictures and do searches. Speech analysis: spectral analysis (spectrograms) pitch analysis formant analysis intensity analysis jitter, shimmer, voice breaks cochleagram excitation pattern Speech synthesis: from pitch, formant, and intensity articulatory synthesis Listening experiments: identification and discrimination tests Labelling and segmentation: label intervals and time points on multiple tiers use phonetic alphabet use sound files up to 2 gigabytes (3 hours) Speech manipulation: change pitch and duration contours filtering Learning algorithms: feedforward neural networks discrete and stochastic Optimality Theory Statistics: multidimensional scaling principal component analysis discriminant analysis Graphics: high quality for your articles and thesis produce Encapsulated PostScript files integrated mathematical and phonetic symbols Programmability: easy programmable scripting language communicate with other programs (the sendpraat source code) create hypertext manuals with sound I/O Portability: machine-independent binary files read and write many sound and other file types Configurability: grow or shrink menus save prefs for fonts, views, sound devices