Praat (, 'talk') is a free computer software package for the scientific analysis of speech in phonetics. It was designed, and continues to be developed, by Paul Boersma and David Weenink of the University of Amsterdam. ดาวน์โหลด praat mac, praat mac, praat mac ดาวน์โหลด ฟรี. Apps recommended for you.
Will Styler
Assistant Teaching Professor - UC San Diego
This was originally posted on my blog, Notes from a Linguistic Mystic in 2014. See all posts
EDIT: According to Mitch Ohriner in November 2019, these instructions still work, albeit with the following two changes. Thanks Mitch!
As part of my dissertation, I’m having to record a large number of subjects and do analyses on their speech. The biggest problem with doing that is that in order to do the analyses automatically, you need to time-align the words, creating files which tell your analysis software (in this case, Praat) where each sentence/word/sound starts and ends.
The fastest way to do this automatically is using what’s called “forced alignment”, and the current best forced aligner for English for phonetic use is the Penn Phonetics Lab Forced Aligner. In this post, I’ll describe how I got it working on my Mac running Mavericks (10.9), in a step-by-step sort of way.
There are four basic steps involved: 1. Install HTK (the hard part!) 2. Install the Penn Phonetics Lab Forced Aligner (henceforth P2FA) 3. Install Sox (which is required by P2FA) 4. Set it up for your data and run it to get aligned textgrids
Disclaimer
This post is up as a public service. I’ve done my absolute best to be comprehensive and clear, but your system/install/issue may vary, and they might update any of these tools at any time, and this post may not change when they do. I’m also mid-dissertation, so I’m unable to offer personal assistance setting up P2FA to commenters or by email.
Feel free to leave a comment if you have a question or issue, and maybe somebody can help, but nothing’s guaranteed. In short, the Linguistic Mystic is not responsible for any troubles, your mileage may vary, good luck and godspeed.
Step 0.5: Xcode Command Line Tools
If you’re doing anything code-y on a Mac, you need Xcode for the compilers and other useful tools it has.
Step 1: Installing HTK
This is the hardest and most terrifying part if you’re not used to compiling and installing command-line tools. We’ll take it step by step, though.
The P2FA readme is very specific that you need version 3.4 of HTK, so let’s install that. The manual isn’t terribly helpful for a Mac install, so we’ll have to go this alone.
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Whew. HTK is installed. That was the tough part. Now let’s install P2FA.
Step 2: Installing Penn Phonetics Lab Forced Aligner
This part’s easier!
Done!
Step 3: Installing Sox
P2FA does depend on Sox to work. The easiest way to get Sox, by far, is using Homebrew, so we’ll do that. Homebrew is a great little program for easily and quickly installing all sorts of fun commandline tools. I love it.
Done!
Step 4: Setting P2FA up for your data and running it
Unfortunately, P2FA needs a particular format for your data to work. In my case, I had a bunch of files of people saying the exact same things, as prompted by a script. So, my sound files started with:
The word is men
The word is mint
Praat Software
… and so forth for the other 318 words which they read in the script.
Praat App For Macbook
To force-align data like this:
Download Praat For WindowsP2FA in Practice
So far, I’ve been really impressed with the results. It’s pretty good, with only one major error (missed word or complete mis-identification) in every two files. Individual sounds are missed more regularly (where it’ll cut off the /z/ in “meds” or the /n/ in “plan”). Vowel boundaries are off by 10 ms or so in around 1/3 of tokens.
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I’ve been hand-correcting the data because I care a lot about those boundaries, but if I just wanted a measure at the center of the vowel, I wouldn’t even bother, as the vowel’s center is quite reliably in the center of the vowel span. Regardless of these issues, using P2FA with hand-correction, I’m able to beautifully annotate data in around 1/4 of the time it takes to do it by hand. It’s an absolutely excellent tool, and would recommend it to anybody.
So, I hope this was helpful, good luck, and good alignment!
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