Guidance to the Praat, a Software for Speech and Acoustic Analysis

Abstract

Praat is a useful analysis tool for linguists, engineers, doctors, speech-language pathologits, music majors, and natural scientists. Basic parameters including duration, pitch, energy and perturbation parameters such as jitter and shimmer can be easily measured and manipulated in the sound editor. When a more in-depth analysis is needed, it is recommended to understand the advanced menus of the object window and learn how to use them. Among the object window menus, vowel formant analysis, spectrum analysis, and cepstrum analysis can be cited as useful ones in the clinical field. The spectrum object can be usefully used for voice quality measurement and diagnosis of patients with voice disorders by showing the energy distribution according to frequency axis (domain). A cepstrum object is useful for speech analysis when periodicity of the sound object is not measurable. The low to high ratio obtained from the spectral object and the CPPs measured from the cepstrum object have attracted many researchers, and it has been proven that the CPPs measured in Praat are relatively excellent.