This handout accompanies the third workshop in the 2019 Praat Scripting Workshop Series, offered at the University of Georgia DigiLab. It builds upon the previous session, so you should be comfortable with Praat objects, variables, and for loops. For more information about the series and for links to the other handouts, visit joeystanley.com/praat.
Today’s workshop is focused on formant extraction. By the end of the hour, you should have a working script that extracts F1, F2, and F3 measurements at the midpoints of all your (vowel) phonemes and exports that information to an external spreadsheet. It’s not a perfect script and there are always ways to improve it, but this should be enough to get you started.
For audio, you are of course free to use whichever files you want, but you can download data that will be used in this workshop at joeystanley.com/data/sample_audio.zip. Specifically, I’ll be using the 19-Kathleen.wav and 19-Kathleen.TextGrid files, which is a 1-minute clip of someone telling about Mount St. Helens. I did the word-level transcription by hand (including boundaries) and then I sent it off to DARLA for forced alignment. Here’s what one word looks like: