Speak and unSpeak with PRAAT

Many linguists use recorded speech in their research. In descriptive work, visual representations of such recordings (mostly oscillograms) are often annotated with IPA symbols and other labels, and then used to illustrate a phenomenon or defend a certain position regarding the nature of some phonetic or phonological property of the language in question. In phonetic and psychophysical research some parameter of the recorded speech (like tempo or intensity) is often altered, after which the new sound thus obtained is used in an experiment to test the sensitivity of the human ear, or brain, to certain speech properties. The introduction of the computer has brought about a virtual revolution in the linguistic sciences with respect to the usage of speech recordings. A lab full of cumbersome machinery has now been replaced by one PC, Mac or workstation, on which anyone who puts his mind to it can record, annotate and modify speech with some simple commands or a few mouseclicks. Even the calculation of some speech parameters that were rather complicated to obtain in the past (like pitch and spectral analysis) but frequently used in phonetic research nonetheless, are now often just one or two mouseclicks away. As a result, a growing number of colleagues ®nd use for ®les with speech sounds in their linguistic explorations. The needs of this group are served by a rather small number of software packages designed for the representation, annotation and analysis of speech (and much more in many cases). In my opinion, one of these stands out in many ways. It is called ``PRAAT''; the imperative form of to speak in Dutch. Since this package is rapidly gaining in popularity, we have decided to devote some attention to it in this issue. First, one of the authors, Paul Boersma, introduces the package and outlines its impressive functionality. Then, an experienced user, Vincent van Heuven, highlights some of the advantages and disadvantages of using PRAAT in everyday phonetic research. It is my sincere hope that these two goodies will convince even more linguists to download PRAAT and experiment with it a little. They will see that incorporating, for example, some oscillograms of minimal pairs in their work is as easy as ABC. Their publications will undoubtedly be the better (and the livelier) for it. PRAAT is a computer program for analysing, synthesizing, and manipulating speech. It has been developed since 1992 by Paul Boersma and David Weenink at the Institute of Phonetic Sciences of the University of Amsterdam. There are versions for most of the common operating systems: Macintosh, Windows, Linux, and several Unix workstations (Solaris, Silicon Graphics, Hewlett-Packard). By September 2001, there were more than 5,000 registered users in 99 countries.