Praat

[ROOD DAVID S]

I might have known Armik would offer more details and better advice -- he
can't write to the list for some reason, though he reads it -- and offers
this much better comparison between Praat and Sound Forge.  Since about
all I do with it is work with long video files, I guess that explains my
prejudice.

David S. Rood
Dept. of Linguistics
Univ. of Colorado
295 UCB
Boulder, CO 80309-0295
USA
rood at colorado.edu

---------- Forwarded message ----------
Date: Tue, 3 Aug 2004 17:34:34 -0600 (MDT)
From: Mirzayan Armik <mirzayan at cslr.Colorado.EDU>
To: ROOD DAVID S <rood at spot.colorado.edu>
Subject: Re: Praat


David,

Just a few comments to add to this since I think there is more to it.
Please feel free to forward this to the list if you think it'll add
anything to the discussion.

Praat is a very good phonetician's tool and I have used it a lot in all my
phonetics courses, in writing papers, and in doing detailed voicing,
pitch-accent, and timing analysis of the Wichita conversation segments.

SoundForge is a good tool as well, but it covers a different domain. The
two softwares overlap, but each one is suited better for different
purpsoses. There are things that are much easier and better in Praat than
in SoundForge, and vice-versa. So, it is kind of difficult to compare the
two on very simple grounds.

Advantages of Praat:
	- It is suited for linguists.
	- Very good for analysis of pitch in words/utternace.
	- Very good for writing scripts to do repetative tasks over
	  a large number of sound files.
	- Has very good spectral analysis tools geared for linguists.
	- Very good for timing events accurately.
	- Produces nice postscript pictures of pitch tracks and
	  spectrograms for putting in papers.
	- Works on mulitple Operating Systems.
	- It's free and easy to install.

About Sound Forge:

While Sound Forge can do some of the above, it is not good at all of them.
It certainly is not free, and it doesn not work on multiple platforms. You
have to work more in SoundForge to get the spectrograms to look like the
kinds of spectrograms you see in phonetics books ...  But, it is very good
for our Wichita project because it has some features which are better
suited for digitizing long stereo quality sound files, making tracks,
archiving, copying and editing *very* long sound files, slicing up sound
very quickly, adding quick annotations, and many more featuers, some of
which I won't list and some of which I don't even know about.  Praat is
much slower for working with long stereo sound files. Sound Forge also
does video display and compression of sound into various formats rather
quickly (depending on the type of computer you use of course). So, which
tool one uses depends on the purpose of the researcher/project etc .... I
have used both tools for working with the Wichita material.

best,
Armik

On Tue, 3 Aug 2004, ROOD DAVID S wrote:

>
> Praat is very popular with both the DoBeS teams and our own graduate
> students, but we (Armik and I) like the commercial program Sound Forge
> much better.  It's not free, but I don't think it's outrageous, and it is
> very easy to use -- it has to be if it's got me doing things with
> spectrograms.
>
> David
>
>
> David S. Rood
> Dept. of Linguistics
> Univ. of Colorado
> 295 UCB
> Boulder, CO 80309-0295
> USA
> rood at colorado.edu
>
> On Tue, 3 Aug 2004, R. Rankin wrote:
>
> >    :-)
> >
> > For those not familiar with it, Praat is the name of a computer program that you
> > can use to analyze speech phonetically.  It is free and can be downloaded at
> > www.praat.org.  I downloaded it some time ago on recommendation of my resident
> > instrumental phonetician, but haven't found the time to get it up and running.
> > It could be used to analyze accent, pitch and length and their connections in
> > languages.
> >
> > ----- Original Message -----
> >
> > > Isn't prat British slang for something like "incompetent bungler"?  We
> > > need training for that?
> >
>