[R] Prosodic/phonetic analysis with R

[(Ted Harding)]

On 26-Dec-04 Ted Harding wrote:
> The advantage of software like 'praat' is that phonetic experts
> have incorporated their understanding -- much clearer than I'm
> likely to achieve from the above -- into the software!

Reporting back on first impressions of 'praat' -- see:

  http://www.praat.org

The software can certainly extract a great variety of different
kinds of phonetic information from speech recorded as a sound
file. Furthermore (though it took some digging around with demos
and such to get to it) you can write out the data for these
parameters to text files in a reasonably transparent format,
which it is more (sometimes) or less (sometimes) easy to edit
into files which can be read straight into R.

In some cases (e.g. the listing of F0) it is a simple two-column
table of time and F0, easily converted into a CSV and then in R
into a time series.

In other cases (e.g. the listing for formants) the file is more
highly structured and in a hierarchical format, and more
sophisticated edting and processing is needed in order to make
it directly readable into R. Nevertheless, it's not obscure and
is quite do-able.

So, for the simple-minded things I'm interested in learning about,
it looks as though 'praat' is a tool which can be quite easily
used in conjunction with R. If any of you are interested in
this kind of work, I'd recommend it as a good place to start.

Best wishes to all,
Ted.


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Date: 26-Dec-04                                       Time: 21:10:44
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