NAME: OSAYAMEN PECULIAR OSAMUDIAMEN

MAT NUMBER: ART1901444

ASSIGNMENT: LST 311 (EXPERIMENTAL PHONETICS)
USING APPROPRIATE ILLUSTRATIONS, DISCUSS ANY TWO SPEECH ANALYSIS SOFTWARE
1. PRAAT

Praat is an open computer software package for speech analysis in

phonetics. It was designed, and continues to be developed, by Paul Boersma and
David Weenink of the institute of Phonetics Sciences of the University of
Amsterdam. It can run on a wide range of operating systems, including various
versions of Unix, Linux, Mac and Microsoft Windows (2000, XP, Vista, 7, 8, 10).
The program supports speech synthesis, including articulatory synthesis. Its logo
depicts a mouth over an ear. It was initially released in 1991 and written in C, C++,
Objective -C programming language. It’s free and available for most platforms.
Praat was designed to cater for different needs with easy interface, many
default options to learn by trying, searchable manual, and various possibilities of
analysis, manipulation and labeling.
There are many Praat tutorials available for helping with the Praat
application. However, the majority of the existing Praat manuals were designed
for software documentation and assumes a strong phonetics or programming
background of readers. The current manual is compiled from a variety of
elaborate manuals with a special focus on those most-frequently used functions
and techniques for acoustic analysis. The target readers of this are those
beginners who are not equipped with a strong phonetics or programming
background but want to do some phonetic analysis of speech sounds. The clear
visual presentation of operational procedures and introduction to acoustic
knowledge are provided to facilitate the use of Praat in linguistic research.

How Praat operates

Praat is available for download from the Praat website. Update frequently
in order to get the latest functions and corrections.
Paul Boersma and David Weeninck produce separate editions of Praat for various
operating systems, e.g. MS Windows, MacOS, Solaris, Linux etc. All editions
function and look alike, with the exception of odd details. The most obvious
differences are mainly how they look on the computer screen, and the individual
sound systems they happen to use (electronics and progams). The correct edition
for your computer system can be downloaded from the Praat website. Note that
some OS versions are no longer fully supported and some suitable older version
of Praat might be recommended (see the Praat website for details). Similarly,
newer versions are no longer provided for Solaris and Linux, however the latest
source code is available for compilation.
Version 5 was introduced in December 2007, version 5.4. in October 2014,
and the last build was 5.4.22. Version 6 was introduced on 28 October 2015, and
the current build (Dec 17 2022) is [Link].
If there are particular difficulties with any operating systems, they are usually
listed on the Praat home page or download page. Other system difficulties are
often mentioned as they arise on the Praat Users discussion group.

Use the black navigation bar at the top of each page. The menus unfold as
the mouse pointer moves over them, revealing the main sections of this website.
Moving around in this guide is like moving around on the web in general: Move
forwards to new pages by mouse-clicking on text links, navigation buttons, or hot
spots on pictures.
Move to and fro among pages you have already seen by clicking on the Back and
Forward buttons on your browser toolbar (the browser is the program you are
using now to read this, e.g. programs like [Link] Explorer or Netscape
Navigator or Firefox etc).
When you follow a link, the new document opens in the same window,
replacing the document you were just reading. You can move between the two
documents by clicking the browser Back or Forward buttons.
Your browser might let you right-mouseclick a link and choose to open the linked
document in a new window or a new tab if you wish. This allows you to have both
documents open side by side.
Your browser might let you use Ctrl+F to search for words in the document you
are currently reading.

Once you’ve opened Praat, several windows will open automatically, and
there are many other windows which will pop up later on when you click different
buttons:
 A. Praat Objects window
The Praat Objects window is where you can open, create and save files. This
menu can be used to open the various editors and queries which you’ll need to
work with sound files.
B. Editor window
The Editor window is where you’ll spend most of your time processing and
measuring the sound file. You can access the Editor window by selecting a sound
and clicking on “View & Edit”. When you open the Editor window, the sound’s
waveform and spectrogram will be shown on the top and the bottom
respectively, and the cursor will allow you to make selections and measurements.
The menus on the top allows you to show and hide different acoustic information
(e.g. formants, pitch, intensity), as well as to make more detailed queries.
C. Info window
When you make a query, either in the editor window or from the objects
window, the Info window will pop up with your results. You can also print to this
window when scripting in Praat. Please note that information printed here will
not necessarily be saved, and running a new query will overwrite it by default.
D. Praat Picture window
The Praat Picture window is used to create and display publication-quality
images, and is open by default when you start the program.

Some of Praat’s most prominent features are:

1. Speech analysis
Praat allows you to analyze different aspects of speech including pitch,
formant, intensity, and voice quality. You have access to spectrograms (a visual
representation of sound changing over time) and cochleagrams (a specific type of
spectrogram more closely resembling how the inner ear receives sound).
2. Speech synthesis
Praat allows you to generate speech from a pitch curve and filters that you
create (acoustic synthesis), or from muscle activities (articulatory synthesis).
3. Speech manipulation
Praat gives you the ability to modify existing speech utterances. You can
alter pitch, intensity, and duration of speech.
4. Speech labelling
 Praat allows you to custom-label your samples using the IPA (International
Phonetics Alphabet), and annotate your sound segments based on the particular
variables you are seeking to analyze. Multi-language text-to-speech facilities allow
you to segment the sound into words and phonemes.
5. Grammar models
With Praat, you can try out Optimality-Theoretic and Harmonic-Grammar
learning, 7as well as several kinds of neural-network models.
6. Statistical analysis
Praat allows you to perform several statistical techniques, among which
multidimensional scaling, principal component analysis, and discriminant analysis.
7. Astounding speech analyzer
Praat is a robust audio analysis tool that will give linguists a high degree of
control over spectrographs. It is packed with state-of-the-art features and tools
that can vest your capability to access, analyze, and produce excellent quality
visuals as an integral part of the acoustic evaluation of speech and voice samples.
Beginners will find this challenging to use, the tutorial guide will be helpful but
navigation is still tricky.

Also, with Praat, we can …

 Generate waveforms, wide and narrow band spectrograms, intensity
contour and pitch tracks;
 Make recordings, edit a recorded sound, and extract individual sounds for
further analysis;
 Get information about pitch, intensity, formants, pulses and etc;
 Enhance certain frequency regions; segment and label words, syllables, or
individual phonemes;
 Put your work in graphic form (‘draw a plot’) for printing.

Strngths and Weakness:

Strengths:
Praat’s strengths are in the acoustic analysis of the individual sounds, in the
annotation of these sounds, and in browsing multiple sound and annotation files
across the the annotation of these sounds, and in browsing multiple sound and
annotation files across the corpus:
1. Imports a wide range of audio formats
 2. Analyzes sound in detail
3. Analysis via scripts
4. Advanced speech analysis features and tools
Weakness:
1. Complex for non-linguists
2. Challenging to operate and navigate

2. SIL Speech Analyzer

Speech Analyzer is a computer program for recording and acoustic analysis
of speech sounds. Developed by SIL International an Organization founded by
William Cameron Townsend a Presbyterian Minister.
SIL International (formerly known as the Summer Institute of Linguistics) is
an evangelical Christian non-profit organization whose main purpose is to study,
develop and document languages, especially those that are lesser-known, in order
to expand linguistic knowledge, promote literacy, translate the Christian Bible into
local languages, and aid minority language development.
It was quite popular some time ago, but was mainly replaced by Praat that
became more widely known. This software is no longer being developed (the last
Modifications were made in 2018). However, it is still used by many researchers.
Speech Analyzer runs on Windows.
A tool for recording, transcribing and analyzing speech sounds. Linguists
and ethnomusicologists can use Speech Analyzer to investigate, mimic and
annotate the acoustic sounds of human language.

You can use Speech Analyzer to do the following tasks:

1. Perform fundamental frequency, spectrographic and spectral analysis, and
duration measurements.
2. Add phonemic, orthographic, tone, and gloss transcriptions to phonetic
transcriptions in an interlinear format.
3. Perform ethnomusicological analysis of music recordings.
4. Use slowed playback, repeat loops and overlays to assist with perception
and mimicry of sounds for language learning
It can also record and open WAV files and it can open MP3 files. The transcription
data is stored in human readable XML format. The data can be read and analyzed
by the Phonology Assistant program which can help to analyze the phonemics of
the phonetic data. Speech Analyzer data can also be imported into a FLEx
database to provide audio examples in a lexicon. All transcription data can be
entered in Unicode.
It also helps in different fields of language science:
Sociolinguistics:
• Collect word lists using IPA transcription and/or audio recording
Language Learning:
• Test aspects of pronunciation (tone, intonation, etc.)
• Aid in learning language monolingually
Linguistics:
• Language Documentation/Corpus Management
Digitally record and play back utterances
Phonology
• Analyze data for stress, intonation and tone

SIL Speech Analyzer also provides the following:

• Transcribe speech files phonetically with IPA

• View sound file as a waveform, pitch plot, spectrogram, spectrum and various
F1 vs. F2 displays
• Formant processing
• Playback at a slower speed
• Playback with variable length delay between repetitions
• Music analysis capability
• Integrated Help files and training materials

Strengths and Weakness:

Strengths:
1. Quite easy to use, and capable of delivering more functions than some
other speech analysis software [Link].
 2. The display format is more flexible, and it’s easy to change between
monochrome and colour spectrograms, and to set the frequency range
displayed.
3. The pitch-tracker works well, and can be set to be restrained within a
particular frequency range.
4. The labelling of segments can be done with proper IPA symbols selected
from IPA Chart-type displays. There is a quite a lot of other phonetic
software that can be downloaded and used in conjunction with this.

Weakness:
1. Positioning the cursors is awkward, requiring some practice.
2. The package is not as flexible as some others in allowing you to design
your own functions.
3. It is no longer being developed, therefore not popularly used now by
phoneticians and researchers.