praat

Speech analysis tool used for doing phonetics by computer

Praat (the Dutch word for "talk") is a free scientific computer software package for the analysis of speech in phonetics. 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). Praat allows you to generate speech from a pitch curve and filters that you create (acoustic synthesis), or from muscle activities (articulatory synthesis). Praat gives you the ability to modify existing speech utterances. You can alter pitch, intensity, and duration of speech. 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. With Praat, you can try out Optimality-Theoretic and Harmonic-Grammar learning, as well as several kinds of neural-network models. Praat allows you to perform several statistical techniques, among which multi- dimensional scaling, principal component analysis, and discriminant analysis.