praatIO

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A library for working with praat, time aligned audio transcripts, and audio files that comes with batteries included.

Praat uses a file format called textgrids, which are time aligned speech transcripts. This library isn't just a data struct for reading and writing textgrids--many utilities are provided to make it easy to work with with transcripts and associated audio files. This library also provides some other tools for use with praat.

Praat is an open source software program for doing phonetic analysis and annotation of speech. Praat can be downloaded here

Table of contents

1. Documentation
2. Tutorials
3. Version History
4. Requirements
5. Installation
6. Version 4 to 5 Migration
7. Usage
8. Common Use Cases
9. Tests
10. Citing praatIO
11. Acknowledgements

Documentation

Automatically generated pdocs can be found here:

http://timmahrt.github.io/praatIO/

Tutorials

There are tutorials available for learning how to use PraatIO. These are in the form of IPython Notebooks which can be found in the /tutorials/ folder distributed with PraatIO.

You can view them online using the external website Jupyter:

Tutorial 1: An introduction and tutorial

Version History

Praatio uses semantic versioning (Major.Minor.Patch)

Please view CHANGELOG.md for version history.

Requirements

Python module https://pypi.org/project/typing-extensions/. It should be installed automatically with praatio but you can install it manually if you have any problems.

Python 3.7.* or above

Click here to visit travis-ci and see the specific versions of python that praatIO is currently tested under

If you are using Python 2.x or Python < 3.7, you can use PraatIO 4.x.

Installation

PraatIO is on pypi and can be installed or upgraded from the command-line shell with pip like so

python -m pip install praatio --upgrade

Otherwise, to manually install, after downloading the source from github, from a command-line shell, navigate to the directory containing setup.py and type

python setup.py install

If python is not in your path, you'll need to enter the full path e.g.

C:\Python37\python.exe setup.py install

Version 4 to 5 Migration

Many things changed between versions 4 and 5. If you see an error like WARNING: You've tried to import 'tgio' which was renamed 'textgrid' in praatio 5.x. it means that you have installed version 5 but your code was written for praatio 4.x or earlier.

The immediate solution is to uninstall praatio 5 and install praatio 4. From the command line:

pip uninstall praatio
pip install "praatio<5"

If praatio is being installed as a project dependency--ie it is set as a dependency in setup.py like

    install_requires=["praatio"],

then changing it to the following should fix the problem

    install_requires=["praatio ~= 4.1"],

Many files, classes, and functions were renamed in praatio 5 to hopefully be clearer. There were too many changes to list here but the tgio module was renamed textgrid.

Also, the interface for openTextgrid() and tg.save() has changed. Here are examples of the required arguments in the new interface

textgrid.openTextgrid(
  fn=name,
  includeEmptyIntervals=False
)

tg.save(
  fn=name,
  format= "short_textgrid",
  includeBlankSpaces= False
)

Please consult the documentation to help in upgrading to version 5.

Usage

99% of the time you're going to want to run

from praatio import textgrid
tg = textgrid.openTextgrid(r"C:\Users\tim\Documents\transcript.TextGrid", False)

Or if you want to work with KlattGrid files

from praatio import klattgrid
kg = klattgrid.openKlattGrid(r"C:\Users\tim\Documents\transcript.KlattGrid")

See /test for example usages

Common Use Cases

What can you do with this library?

• query a textgrid to get information about the tiers or intervals contained within

  tg = textgrid.openTextgrid("path_to_textgrid", False)
  entryList = tg.tierDict["speaker_1_tier"].entryList # Get all intervals
  entryList = tg.tierDict["phone_tier"].find("a") # Get the indicies of all occurrences of 'a'

• create or augment textgrids using data from other sources

• found that you clipped your audio file five seconds early and have added it back to your wavefile but now your textgrid is misaligned? Add five seconds to every interval in the textgrid

  tg = textgrid.openTextgrid("path_to_textgrid", False)
  moddedTG = tg.editTimestamps(5)
  moddedTG.save('output_path_to_textgrid', 'long_textgrid', True)

• utilize the klattgrid interface to raise all speech formants by 20%

  kg = klattgrid.openKlattGrid("path_to_klattgrid")
  incrTwenty = lambda x: x * 1.2
  kg.tierDict["oral_formants"].modifySubtiers("formants",incrTwenty)
  kg.save(join(outputPath, "bobby_twenty_percent_less.KlattGrid"))

• replace labeled segments in a recording with silence or delete them

  • see /examples/deleteVowels.py

• use set operations (union, intersection, difference) on textgrid tiers

  • see /examples/textgrid_set_operations.py

• see /praatio/praatio_scripts.py for various ready-to-use functions such as

  • splitAudioOnTier(): split an audio file into chunks specified by intervals in one tier
  • spellCheckEntries(): spellcheck a textgrid tier
  • tgBoundariesToZeroCrossings(): adjust all boundaries and points to fall at the nearest zero crossing in the corresponding audio file
  • alignBoundariesAcrossTiers(): for handmade textgrids, sometimes entries may look as if they are aligned at the same time but actually are off by a small amount, this will correct them

Tests

I run tests with the following command (this requires pytest and pytest-cov to be installed):

pytest --cov=praatio tests/

Citing praatIO

PraatIO is general purpose coding and doesn't need to be cited but if you would like to, it can be cited like so:

Tim Mahrt. PraatIO. https://github.com/timmahrt/praatIO, 2016.

Acknowledgements

Development of PraatIO was possible thanks to NSF grant BCS 12-51343 to Jennifer Cole, José I. Hualde, and Caroline Smith and to the A*MIDEX project (n° ANR-11-IDEX-0001-02) to James Sneed German funded by the Investissements d'Avenir French Government program, managed by the French National Research Agency (ANR).