Table of Contents:

About Praat:

Praat is a free, cross-platform software for analyzing, synthesizing, and manipulating speech sounds. It is available for download from www.praat.org or www.fon.hum.uva.nl/praat/. Versions are available for Windows, Mac, and Linux. A helpful tutorial is available at www.fon.hum.uva.nl/praat/manual/Intro.html or in the software help menu. Praat can read a sound from a file, record directly into the program, or create a sound from a formula. It can then be used to:

• View, configure, query, or print spectrograms

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

• View, configure, query, or print pitch contours

• View, configure, query, or print formant contours

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

• View, configure, query, or print intensity contours

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Recommendations for further reading in acoustic sound analysis:

• Ladefoged, Peter and Sandra Ferrari Disner. 2012. Vowels and Consonants: Third Edition. Malden, MA: Blackwell Publishing.
  (Relevant chapters: 2. Pitch and Loudness, 4. The Sounds of Vowels, 5. Charting Vowels, 6. The Sounds of Consonants, 9. Listening Computers)
• Ladefoged, Peter. 2003. Phonetic data analysis. Malden, Massachusetts and Oxford, England: Blackwell Publishing.
  (Relevant chapters: 4. Pitch, Loudness, and Length, 5. Characterizing Vowels, 6. Acoustic Analysis of Consonants, 7. Acoustic Analysis of Phonation Types.)
• Johnson, Keith. 2012. Acoustic and Auditory Phonetics, 3rd edition. Cambridge, MA: Blackwell Publishing.
  (Relevant to this topic: Part 2. Speech Analysis)