1. An Introduction to : a closer look at analysing vowels
Lenia Galata
ELAN and PRAAT workshop: 15 June 2016

2. Outline How Praat looks Tutorials and ‘Help’ Opening a sound file
Example sound file
‘Good’ sound files
A closer look at a spectrogram
Vowels and their acoustical properties (duration and formants)
How to use Formant information
Formants and consonants
Annotation in Praat

3. How Praat looks

4. Tutorials and ‘Help’
Several tutorials available from:
Also: click the ’Help’ button on the ’Praat objects’
and ‘Praat Picture’ windows

5. Opening a sound file
On ‘Praat Objects’ window: Open Read from file…/ Open Long sound file…  Select sound file to open  file is imported under ‘Objects’

6. Example sound file What is a spectrogram and how to open one?
After sound file is under ‘Objects’  click ‘View and Edit’ on the right  spectrogram opens on a separate window

7. ‘Good’ sound files Record in .wav (not .mp3 or other formats!)
Set recorder with the following settings: sampling rate: 48 kHz/16-bit resolution
Choose quietest recording conditions possible, to get a low signal-to-noise ratio

8. A closer look at a spectrogram
Word boundaries - Noise - Vowels - Consonants

9. Vowels and their acoustical properties: Duration
Vowel durations: vowel onset and offset; diphthongs: longer and with two amplitude peaks
Measurement: find vowel boundaries (‘darker’ part of spectrogram) make selection click to play and check  duration appears on top grey bar, above spectrogram

10. Formants
Formants: F1= height (low F1=higher vowel); F2= frontness/backness (low F2= back vowel/ high F2= front vowel)
How to extract: on spectrogram, highlight vowel review more ‘stable’ part/ midpoint/ 25%, 50%, 75% of vowel click ‘Formants’  show Formants  Get first formant F1, Get second formant F2

12. How to use Formant information
Create a vowel space: visual representation of oral cavity and where vowels are situated
Retrieve F1 and F2 information  plot values on an F1*F2 vowel chart
Vowel spaces show different productions of the same vowel among speakers
Normalisation: use of statistical models to control for factors such as: speaker gender, age etc.

13. Formants and consonants
How do consonants affect vowel formants?
Quality of surrounding sounds can cause a lowering of the formants (e.g. bilabials /p/ and /b/) . They can also cause less systematic changes to vowel formants, depending on both the consonant and vowel quality

14. Annotation in Praat
Select sound under ‘Praat objects’  click ‘Annotate’  ’To TextGrid…’ add number of tiers and name accordingly

15. How to include phonetic symbols in annotation
Including vowel phonetic symbols in Praat: Retrieved from:

16. Annotation in Praat (cont.)
New item added under ‘Objects’ select sound and Text grid file View & Edit
Spectrogram now appears with relevant tiers  click on individual circles to set boundaries for words and sounds and name
Tier being annotatd: in yellow

17. Annotated word

18. Sources
Adank, P., Smits, R., & Van Hout, R. (2004). A comparison of vowel normalization procedures for language variation research. The Journal of the Acoustical Society of America, 116(5),
Derdemezis, E., Vorperian, H. K., Kent, R. D., Fourakis, M., Reinicke, E. L., & Bolt, D. M. (2015). Optimizing vowel formant measurements in four acoustic analysis systems for diverse speaker groups. American Journal of Speech-Language Pathology.
Flynn, N. (2011). Comparing vowel formant normalisation procedures. York Papers in Linguistics Series, 2(11),
[PRAAT website]
[Measuring vowel quality]
[How to: Phonetic analysis using formant measurements]
[Measuring vowel durations using Praat]
[Praat Scripts]
[Including phonetic symbols in Praat: vowels]