1. Praat Phonetics
2. Praat Doing Phonetics

Once you know how to use some of Praat's functions, you will have a very powerful set of learning and analysis tools at your disposal that can help bring you up to the next level in your study of phonetics. Praat allows you to divide up the sound signal into temporal stretches or intervals, and to assign text or labels to these intervals. It does this by means of what it calls a TextGrid. The basic idea is that one might want to divide a signal into intervals in more than one way. PRAAT is a very flexible tool to do speech analysis. It offers a wide range of standard and non-standard procedures, including spectrographic analysis, articulatory synthesis, and neural networks. This tutorial specifically targets clinicians in the field of communication disorders who want to learn more about the use of PRAAT as part of an.

Assistant Teaching Professor - UC San Diego

Praat Phonetics

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Using Praat for Linguistic Research by Will Styler is a practical guidebook and information package designed to help you use the Praat phonetics software package more effectively in Phonetic or Phonological research. Although it was originally written in the Spring/Summer of 2011 for the 2011 Linguistic Institute’s Praat workshop, it’s now available for anybody who’s interested, and is being updated over time, both as Praat changes and as the author adds new information.

The guidebook itself is an 85+ page compilation of walkthroughs, explanations, and tutorials explaining how to use Praat for a variety of measurements and tasks. Although the guide does start with “basic” tasks like opening sound files, measuring duration, formants, pitch, it also covers more “advanced” tasks like source-filter resynthesis, A1-P0 nasality measurement, formula manipulation of sounds and even Praat scripting.

In addition to the guidebook, I’ve also made available a collection of documents, presentations, scripts and sound files which, along with a short syllabus, formed the core of the LSA Praat workshop. The scripts are made freely available for use and code-cannibalism, and the sound files are free for use in teaching oneself to use Praat with the Guidebook and the syllabus/worksheet.

Use and License Information

Using Praat for Linguistic Research is completely free, and is available for use, both privately and as a part of classes. All I ask is that you share this link to share the guide (rather than sharing the PDF itself) so that people end up with the latest versions.

Also, if you’re using the guide in your class or project, I’d love it if you’d send me an email (will at savethe vowels dot org), so I can see where my work is going, and so I can get ideas as to how to improve it for the future.

Using Praat for Linguistic Research is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution ShareAlike (CC BY-SA) License. More information on this license is available here, but in short, this license means that I’d appreciate if you’d attribute my work to me, and that any derivative works must also be creative commons licensed. Free should stay free.

Any questions, comments, concerns or corrections should be sent to me by email - will (at) savethevowels (dot) org.

Downloads

Latest Version (1.8.3) released March 10th, 2021

Download the Guide as a PDF. Please check back here regularly for updated versions, and please do not re-post this PDF on your own public-facing course website (as this can result in people and search index finding old versions instead of the newest one).

The slides, syllabus, and a collection of sound files which, along with the PDF above, formed the core of the 2011 LSA Instituate’s Praat workshop. Download this file (and the scripts below) to play along from home.

Praat Doing Phonetics

This has all of the scripts I distributed with the Praat workshop, and more. Great for cannibalizing code, and learning all the silly things I’ve done in writing my own scripts. The “demo script” referred to in the materials is demo_formant_script.praat.

This is the presentation given at the 2017 LSA Annual Meeting’s LSA Minicourse, describing the basics of Praat scripting. Although its effectiveness is much reduced without my frantic hand-waving, you might still find it useful or interesting. Use the on-screen arrows or arrow keys to advance the slides.

Institutions and Courses which have used “Using Praat for Linguistic Research”

Please let me know if you’ve used this manual in your course or organization, as the warm-fuzzy feeling that gives me is the only pay I get. These are some of the many institutions which have (at least once!) used ‘Using Praat…’ as part of their teaching curricula.

• The 2011 and 2013 LSA Institute Praat workshops
• Undergraduate and Graduate Linguistics Classes at UC San Diego
• Graduate and Undergraduate Phonetics courses at the University of Colorado
• Advanced Phonetics at the University of Sheffield
• Graduate Phonetics at the University of Pennsylvania
• Graduate Phonetics at the University of Michigan
• Undergraduate Speech Science at Cal State University San Marcos
• Technical Tools for Linguists (LING 5050) at The Ohio State University
• Praat workshops at Beijing Language and Culture University
• Graduate Phonetics and Phonology courses at Guangxi University for Nationalities
• Phonetics classes at Northwestern University
• Classes at the Moody Bible Institute
• The 2017 LSA Institute’s “Praat Beyond the Basics” mini-course
• Graduate Seminars at the University of Düsseldorf
• Undergraduate Sociophonetics Classes at Pomona College
• Portland State University
• University of North Dakota
• Rice University
• Postgraduate courses at the University of Crete, Greece
• Field Methods at the University of Oklahoma
• Classes at the African Linguistics School

It has also been cited in 40+ publications.

Praat for Beginners:
Introduction

1. This beginners guide

• This manual for Praat is intended for beginners in speech analysis and synthesis. It also assumes modest computer experience (if you find something too explicit, just skip and read on).
• Examples and screen shots are from the Windows edition of Praat.
• The following paragraphs explain how you can obtain the Praat program, and how you can use this guide.

2. What is Praat?

• Praat is a program for speech analysis and synthesis written by Paul Boersma and David Weenink at the Department of Phonetics of the University of Amsterdam. The Praat website is here. The program is constantly being improved and new builds are published frequently.
• There is a Praat Users discussion group where queries and allied topics are discussed, with responses from colleagues or from the authors themselves. Topics range from elementary “how do I” queries to advanced issues in scriptwriting. There’s something there for everybody. You can sign up to become a member on the Praat website).

3. Downloading Praat

• Praat is available for download from the Praat website (instructions here). 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 (April 2021) is 6.1.42.
• 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.

4. Finding your way around in this guide

• 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 M.S.Internet 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.

5. Help

• Need help? When looking for more detail about some subject, you can search this website from the Help: Search this site box to the right of the page. Also, see these sections: