Practical Acoustics in Clinical Voice Assessment: A Praat Primer

Abstract

Praat is a freely available software package for formatting and analyzing sound signals. It carries many features relevant to voice signals and it has the possibility to run customized scripts. Praat can therefore be employed for acoustic voice analysis for clinical, educational, and research purposes; however, under the condition that voice signals are sampled for sufficient recording quality. This text first addresses recording-related issues and subsequently describes how Praat can be operated to yield numerical and graphical information regarding, for example, fundamental frequency, sound level, spectrum, spectrogram, cepstrum, and cepstrogram.