Praat
Scripts (automatisation)
Scripts are a great way of (semi-)automatizing all the things that Praat can do. They are essentially little programs that take care of all the tedious, repetitive bits of data processing. A good script can easily save you hours and hours of work. Load a script by clicking on “Praat”, “Open Praat script”. Run it by clicking “Run” and “Run” (shortcut: CTRL + R).
You can either write a script yourself, or — and that’s by far the easier version — you can try to find a ready-made one that you can use or that you only have to adapt a bit. Dozens of scripts can be downloaded for free and there’s a good chance there’s already one around that does just what you want. Examples of what you can do automatically with scripts:
- split sounds or TextGrids into separate files
- measure pitch and formants
- measure the duration of sounds or whole intervals (-> TextGrid)
- write all of this into a nice table that you can directly feed into your statistics software
- modify pitch (easy!), duration (easy!), or formants (more complicated...)
- ...
An interesting website regarding this topic can be found here:
http://www.linguistics.ucla.edu/faciliti/facilities/acoustic/praat.html
Don’t hesitate to get in touch with me. I’ll gladly help you to find a suitable script if applicable.