Tag Archives: audio editor

Scientific sound analysis – Praat

Praat is a multifunctional tool for speech analysis and synthesis. You can use it for transcriptions, signal manipulations (e.g. editing, altering stimuli duration or pitch manipulations), recognition experiments (e.g., yes-no decisions, but no latencies), acoustic-phonetic measurements. It produces nice spectrogram- and other plots. Praat comes with an implemented scripting language which allows automatized processing of stimuli.

However, Praat’s handling is absolutely non-intuitive for windows users and/or no-programmers and the massive manual is not too helpful for beginners. Thus, a brief introduction by a colleague will save a lot of time and effort.

(If you want to use it for annotations only, ELAN may be the better option)

Visit this page for beginners’ tutorials. For more help, join this yahoo user-group.

Audacity – free audio editor

If you need auditiv material in a study, Audacity is your software to record or edit your stimuli. Audacity is free, open source software for recording and editing sounds. It is available for Mac OS X, Windows, Linux, and other operating systems. Besides general functions (such as cuting, deleting or coping parts,…) there are also different special effects:

  • Noise Removal (remove static, hiss, hum, or other constant background noises).
  • Alter frequencies with Equalization and Bass Boost effects.
  • Adjust volumes with Compressor, Amplify, and Normalize effects.
  • Phaser
  • Wahwah
  • Echo

List of features: http://audacity.sourceforge.net/about/features
Download Audacity: http://audacity.sourceforge.net/?lang=en