Voice

This tutorial describes how you can do voice analysis with Praat. To understand this tutorial, you have to be familiar with the Intro, which describes the more general features of the SoundEditor window.

Most of Praat’s voice analysis methods start from the glottal pulses that are visible in the SoundEditor window as blue vertical lines through the waveform. If you do not see these lines, choose Show pulses from the Pulses menu. If your sound is long, you may have to zoom in in order to see the separate pulses. You may notice that for some sounds, the time location of the pulses can vary when you zoom or scroll. This is because only the visible part of the sound is used for the analysis. The measurement results will also vary slightly when you zoom or scroll.

The Pulse menu contains the command Voice report, which will show in the Info window the results of many voice measurements for the visible part of the selection (or for the visible part of the whole sound, if there is a cursor instead of a selection or if the selection is not visible).

## Pitch settings

The results of the voice measurements will depend on your Pitch settings. In general, you will want to be careful about the pitch range. The standard range is 75–600 Hertz, but take a range of e.g. 50–200 Hertz for pathological male voices if that is the typical range. You may also want to choose Optimize for voice analysis; otherwise, the voice report will complain about possible inaccuracies. The “advanced” pitch settings like Silence threshold and Octave jump cost can stay at their standard values.

  Voice 1. Voice breaks
  Voice 2. Jitter
  Voice 3. Shimmer
  Voice 4. Additive noise (HNR, harmonicity)
  Voice 5. Comparison with other programs
  Voice 6. Automating voice analysis with a script

### Links to this page

- Acknowledgments
- Advanced pulses settings...
- Types of objects