What to read after Praat & Scripting (English Version)?

Praat scripting is like cooking…

This book deals with everything about Praat. The author, however, does not know everything about it. The more you know, the more you see, as the old saying goes. I wrote it to the best of my knowledge.

During the long years with Praat, I've written many scripts and given many talks and presentations. I collected them all here in this book. I'd be very happy if researchers from a variety of majors could get help. Any errors or mistakes are mine, so please let me know.

This book is just a beginning. A lot of room for improvement, I admit. Since I didn't write it at one sitting, it could be more organized and focused. Let me know via my contact so that I can supplement this book.

Writing about Praat and scripts, I felt that scripting is like cooking a luxury cuisine. Input files are like good ingredients, variables and objects are like containers such as dishes and plates, functions and operators are like cooking utensils, cooking is like running script commands and finished cuisine is like output files.

It could be difficult and boring to beginners, but I tried to be as easy and fun as possible. It's a thick book, but reading from time to time, you could become a scripting expert in no time and feel the joy, just like finishing a delicious cuisine...

I hope that what's in this book would satisfy advanced learners as well as beginners. For beginners, I tried to introduce basic techniques of making a recording and doing analyses and resynthesis, e.g. manipulating pitch and durations. For advanced learners, I tried my best to introduce the basics and advanced topics of Praat scripting with real scripts from my own papers and works and to explain how scripting can help you with your various linguistic works. Lastly, I introduce how you can extract various linguistic information from speech corpora, e.g. the Buckeye corpus and Seoul corpus, using Praat and scripting. Particularly, I open to the public the scripts I used to build the Seoul corpus, which I hope will help you understand that scripting can help you work with a speech corpus.

This book is for people who know the least about computers, such as launching an installed application and handling files in their computer. Don't worry, however, you're not good at computers. I tried to be as kind as possible as if I'm dealing with beginners. Most operating systems are largely divided into Windows and Macs. I wrote this book on my MacOS machine, but I also added descriptions for Windows systems.

Also, I assume that readers have the basic knowledge on phonetics, e.g. a sound file being displayed on a spectrogram as well as on a waveform display. For professional knowledge, consult books on phonetics. Nonetheless, I use some professional terms necessary for our readers to perform tasks related to phonetics and linguistics in general.

The book is organized as three parts. Part A Praat Basics teaches you the basics of Praat and scripts. Part B Praat Advanced encourages you to start writing scripts based on what you learned earlier with sample and real scripts. Part C Praat for Corpus has two areas; Area 1 introduces the Buckeye corpus and Area 2 the Seoul corpus. You learn that Praat and scripts can be useful in your research with speech corpora.

So much for the official stuff. Now, what I'd really liked to say to readers. Software such as Praat may be easy for engineering students or people familiar with computers. Those of you who know one or two programming languages may think Praat scripting is a piece of cake. A couple of days or weeks later, you'd write basic and advanced scripts. A couple of months, you could lead a big project like building a speech corpus.

However, this book is not for those computer experts. Rather, the book is for those not familiar with computers and afraid of coding or scripting. If you think, "Is scripting worth my precious time?", "I would rather ask some Praat expert I know to do this job for me", "I give up this topic. Let's find another topic", this book is for you. I told some of my friends that I would some day write this book so that ordinary people could write a basic script. After reading this book and if you still cannot write a simple script, it means my book is not doing what it's meant for. I'd have to keep improving it until it does. I kept my end of the bargain, so it's your, readers' turn. I plan to revise this book to its 2nd version, 3rd version, and so on. As Rome was not built in a day, I'll be waiting for your feedbacks.

I've used Praat and scripts for a long time, but as I said, I do not know everything about them. It's not why I wrote this book either. Rather, I wrote this book to tell you, among the huge number of wonderful features of Praat, which ones are frequently used in works related to phonetics, speech synthesis and linguistics in general. The features not frequently used and I know little about, I did not even mention them. For beginners, I think it's equally important to know even the basic features and use them well. Not all the features of Praat are equally important and are equally used frequently. I intended to introduce to readers the most frequent and necessary features of Praat so that they understand the relative importance of all the features and can use them in their daily research works. My job is to let them enter the wonderful world of Praat. Once you get in, sit tight and enjoy your ride!

A single step toward a journey of a thousand miles.

2021.02.28 Kyuchul Yoon, Ph.D. Professor in Phonetics