Getting Started

 

1. Download and install the software: www.praat.org or www.fon.hum.uva.nl/praat/.
    
2. Launch the software (click the icon of a mouth over an ear ). Two windows will open: Praat Objects and Praat Picture.
    
3. In the Praat Objects window, select one of the options from the "New" or "Open" menus to import an existing sound file, record a new sound, or create a sound from a formula. For more information about this, see step 1 of the Praat Help Menu Intro tutorial. Important note from this tutorial: If your sound file is longer than a couple of minutes, or if you want to see and listen to both channels of a stereo sound, you may prefer to open it with Open long sound file.... This puts a LongSound object into the list. In this way, most of the sound will stay in the file on disk, and at most 60 seconds will be read into memory each time you play or view a part of it.
    
4. Your sound should now appear in the list of objects. Select your sound object and click "View & Edit" (Or just "View" if you followed the instructions above for a "LongSound" file).
    
5. A SoundEditor window will appear. At the top of the window will appear one waveform for mono or two waveforms for stereo. Any analyses you have selected will appear below the waveforms (if no analyses appear, you may need to zoom in, or select "show" from any of the drop down menus for Spectrum, Pitch, Intensity, Formant, or Pulses).
   
6. From the drop down menus, you can select "settings" to configure the spectrogram, pitch contour, formant contour, or intensity contour; select "get" to query the frequency, spectral power, pitch, intensity, or any of the formants at any given point on the waveform; select "paint" or "draw" to export the spectrogram, pitch contour, formant contour, or intensity contour into the "Praat Objects" window, where you can print, save, or copy the image. Or, from the drop down menus, select "extract" to create a new object containing just the spectrogram, pitch contour, formant contour, or intensity contour. These will then appear in the Objects window and can be manipulated separately.
    
7. Note than any "Objects" you have created will need to be saved to file before you close the program.