Resources

Open source software packages such as Praat and ESPS have enabled large-scale processing and analysis of speech data. For phoneticians, we often work with first-hand audio data or speech corpora, and begin with the preparation of speech data involving reformatting, transcription, and segmentation. Such pre-processing steps make the speech data searchable and convenient for us to retrieve and extract units of interest.

In the course of my DPhil/PhD studies, I have established a few useful pipelines or workflows that automated some procedures and greatly boosted my efficiency, and accumulated a bunch of scripts. Some scripts are directly downloaded online from those who kindly shared their efforts, others are either adapted from others to suit my own purposes or my nascent attempts in a few programming languages. Dipping my toes in scripting was a steep learning curve (a process of trial and error!) but worthwhile.

Here I would also like to share some scripts of mine (and brief tutorials of how to use them), to pay it forward to the community where their generous sharing helped me a lot. This also serves as an archive of some of my analysis procedures, making the research open and reproducible.

Prerequisites

I mainly use Unix Shell, Python, R, and Praat in these posts. So it would make more sense to you if you have some very basic ideas about Unix Shell commands and Praat.

Click on the following topics to start and have hands-on practices!

Audio Processing

Your essential guide to audio signal processing.

Research Hacks

Your essential guide to efficient and effective research in the digital age.

Utilising ASR in Linguistic Research

A step-by-step guide to apply automatic speech recognition technology in linguistic research.

Speech Corpus Querying

A step-by-step guide to extract targeted speech intervals from your own speech corpus.

Forced Alignment Using P2FA and MFA for Mandarin data

A step-by-step guide to automatic forced alignment of your own corpus using P2FA and Montreal Forced Aligner.

Polynomial F0 Curve Fitting

A step-to-step guide to fitting polynomial models to F0 curves.