Module 4: PRAAT

General description

This course will introduce Praat scripting. By using scripts it will be much easier to replicate your analyses on speech files and to communicate with others about what you have done and how you have done it.

After this course you will be able to read and understand scripts written by others, and, you will be able to write your own Praat scripts to do your analyses.

  • Day 1: Introduction to scripting
    Expressions: operator precedence
    Numerical and string expressions
    Numerical and string variables.
    Writing to the Info window
  • Day 2: Loops and forms
    Feedback on yesterday’s assignment
    Conditional expressions (if then else), loops (for, do while), form
  • Day 3: Procedures and selections
    Feedback on yesterday’s assignment
    Procedures, working with objects (selecting and removing objects)
    File i/o and absolute and relative filepaths.
  • Day 4: Lists of files
    Feedback on yesterday’s assignment
    Working with a list of files in a directory.
    Setting up the core scripting structure for getting analysis result for specified intervals from a tier in a TextGrid.
  • Day 5: Constructing a script together
    Feedback on yesterday’s assignment.
    Arrays, vectors and hashes

Target audience

If you need to process a lot of speech files and you have to do analyses on all  these files, and you do not have programming experience this course is for you.  If you finish this course you will be able to  read and understand Praat scripts and you also will be able to write simple scripts.

Course prerequisites

Basic working knowledge of the program Praat.
Read the first three chapters in the book.

Course materials

Weenink (2018), Speech Signal Processing with Praat.

The pdf of the book can be downloaded from http://www.uvafon.hum.uva.nl/david/sspbook/sspbook.pdf.

Chapter 4 is about scripting.

Teacher bio

David Weenink is associated with the Linguistics department of the University of Amsterdam and he is one of the authors of the computer program Praat. He is an experienced teacher of speech sound processing for linguistic students.

Schedule

  • Monday 15/07/2024, 14:00-15:30 & 16:00-17:30
  • Tuesday 16/07/2024, 14:00-15:30 & 16:30-17:30
  • Wednesday 17/07/2024, 14:00-15:30 & 16:00-17:30
  • Thursday 18/07/2024, 14:00-15:30 & 16:00-17:30
  • Friday 18/07/2024, 14:00-15:30 & 16:00-17:30

To master scripting, actually writing scripts has more effects than studying scripts. During the course most of the learning will hopefully take place.  Nevertheless, studying more advanced scripts might help to understand how to tackle more complicated tasks.