If you look closely, you'll notice that this scripts incorporates several parts (or large chunks) of other people's work, and I'm indebted to their pioneering spirit. Since I couldn't find an existing tool that could do this, and since I wanted it all to be done in a single program (rather than switching between two/several) I created the Praat script that you can find here at my GitHub page under the folder ' Analyze Tone'. I also wanted to easily re-adjust the visualization parameters so that I could output a permanent image. The problem I tried to solve was basically this: I was investigating a language (Biate) for which no research had been done on tone, and I needed a way to quickly visualize the tonal (F0) properties of a large number of items. This is fine if pitch is the primary acoustic correlate of all tones, but what if duration/length is an important correlate as well? How does a researcher begin to discover whether that is the case? So for example, in image #1 below of Cantonese tones (from this paper), all pitches are plotted across the same duration. One issue with this approach, however, is that often pitch tracks for each tone are time-normalized along with every other tone. Tone researchers often use a script to extract F0, and then apply various normalization techniques to the extracted data, plotting the results in a word-processing program like Excel or by using a more robust statistical tool like R (see this paper or this post for more details, and James Stanford has done some good work on this subject - see his presentation on Socio-tonetics here). Praat can extract the fundamental frequency as well as other frequencies (formants) that are important for various vowels. The pitch correlates of tones are relatively easy for Praat to identify, as its instrumentally observable correspondence is the fundamental frequency (F0) of a sound. Register languages are found throughout South-East Asia. Languages for which pitch is not the overall primary acoustic correlate of tone are often called 'register' languages. Burmese), jitter, shimmer, creakiness, or length. There are also languages for which the primary acoustic correlate of tone (or some tones) is not pitch, but rather voice quality: glottalization (i.e. Asian languages tend to have contour tone: this means that across the tone-bearing-unit (TBU) the pitch may rise or fall. African languages tend to have register tone: this means that pitch height (measured in frequency, often by Hz) is the primary acoustic correlate of tone in these languages. The major tone types are 'register' and 'contour' tones - often languages will be categorized as having one or the other, but some have both types. Another important piece of information to remember is that there are quite a few different kinds of tone languages. Tone has a lot of similarity to pitch as used in music, which is why tones often seem to 'disappear' or be relatively unimportant in songs sung in languages that otherwise have tone (like Mandarin). In linguistics, this is a "suprasegmental" feature, which essentially means that it occurs in parallel with the phonetic segments of speech created by the movement of articulators (tongue, mouth, etc.) of the human vocal apparatus. In this post, I use the word 'tone' to refer specifically to pitch that is used in a language at the word or morpheme level to indicate a difference in meaning from another word (or words) that are otherwise segmentally identical. But regarding tone, while Praat can easily identify and measure tone, there are no comprehensive scripts that help a linguist to instrumentally investigate tones in a systematic way. While not part of the series of posts I've been working on describing my tools and workflow, this particular script is a recent tool that I've developed for analyzing and exploring tonal patterns.Īs I noted in my post on Praat scripting, the Praat program gives linguists a relatively easy way to investigate the properties of speech sounds, and scripts help to automate relatively mundane tasks. Along the lines of some of my previous posts on tools for linguistic analysis, I thought I'd post a quick update on a Praat script I've been working on.
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