Praat
TextGrids
TextGrids are a way of annotating text and are great for stuff like conversation analysis or just better orientation within the sound file. Also, many of the scripts (see below) that you can use for automatic data processing need a TextGrid as a basis.
- Mark a sound in your objects list and click ‘Annotate -’, ‘To TextGrid. . . ’.
- Name the tiers, e.g with ‘speaker A’ and ‘speaker B’. You probably won’t need any point tiers, so make sure this box is empty.
- The TextGrid appears as a new object in your objects list. Mark both the sound and the corresponding TextGrid and click on ‘View & Edit’.
- The active tier is yellow. Now click somewhere in the spectrogram and start the playback. Pressing enter will add a boundary on the selected tier at the corresponding time.
- These boundaries mark off intervals on the tiers. You can label those intervals by simply marking them and typing in any text you like, e.g. the transcription of the sound passage.
example of a TextGrid, aligned with sound file
This can be done individually on every tier, so if you had a tier for every speaker in your recording you could, for instance, easily see who interrupts whom, how often and how much they talk at the same time etc.
Boundaries can be moved around by simple drag-and-drop. If you want to delete a boundary, mark it and press ALT + BACKSPACE. Don’t forget to save your TextGrid by clicking ‘File’ and ‘Save TextGrid as text file. . . ’ (shortcut: CTRL + S)!
video tutorial: text grids