Linguistics 520
Introduction to Phonetics
Useful software
In addition to Praat, there are some other programs that may also be useful. Unless otherwise noted, all of the programs below are free, and have linux, windows, and mac versions.
Audio:
Audacity is free, open source, multi-platform software for recording and editing sounds. It works well with large audio files, and (if you also download and install the Lame mp3 encoder) it makes it easy to go back and forth between .mp3 and .wav formats in an interactive setting.
SoX is "the Swiss Army knife of sound processing programs". It's a command-line program with a rather ugly interface, but it can do a very large variety of things to sounds, especially in the area of format conversions.
WaveSurfer is an open-source tool for sound visualization and manipulation. It can display spectrograms, pitch tracks, and formant tracks, as well as waveforms. Under the "convert" menu, there are some convenient options for sample rate conversion, amplitude normalization, and so on. It's not as flexible as Praat, but you may find that it's more convenient for some kinds of interactive use. Its pitch tracker is also somewhat better than the one in Praat. (You can turn WaveSurfer label files into Praat TextGrids, if you want to.)
Transcriber is a tool for segmenting, labelling and transcribing speech. If you have significant amounts of speech to transcribe, this is a much more efficient option than any of the other choices.
Statistics:
R is a terrific free software environment for statistical computing and graphics. It'll be our standard program for statistical analysis, data plotting, and so on.
Signal processing:
Matlab is most commonly used for this purpose. Unfortunately, it's far from free.
Octave is a free software semi-equivalent, which will work for many applications, and we'll make some use of it in this course.