3.1 What is Praat?

Praat is an open source software suite that was developed at the University of Amsterdam by Paul Boersma and David Weenink. Everybody can download it for free at http://www.fon.hum.uva.nl/praat/. It works for every common operating system. The software is constantly updated and so are the tutorials that are offered first of all for beginners but also for experts who have questions on specific topics. Praat offers the possibility to record mono and stereo sounds and to edit and analyse sounds regarding intensity, pitch height, duration or formants. Furthermore, so called TextGrid-Objects can be created in order to transcribe and annotate sound objects. Another interesting possibility is creating artificial sounds (e.g. pause, murmur) with certain mathematic formulas.

For beginners and persons switching from another speech analysis software to Praat, the software might appear complicated at the beginning. Therefore, some practice is required before starting an actual experiment.

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