Praat

Praat: A comprehensive speech analysis application

Praat is an amazing speech analysis software solution, designed for individuals that want to analyze, manipulate and synthesize speech. It even lets you generate images which can be exported and inserted into your personal documents.

The simple and concise UI offers two main windows – in one you can manage the current project, and in the other you can see the image you created after you finish processing the audio.

Regarding speech analysis, the tool lets you perform various types – spectral, formant, pitch and intensity analysis. Furthermore you can study shimmer, voice and jitter breaks and for that you’ll obviously need a general understanding of soundwaves and processing them. Nevertheless, Praat does bundle extensive documentation that can help you get familiar with the terminology and how it works.

The editor shows a spectrogram related to the audio file you loaded. There you can use the tools that can perform the types of analysis mentioned above.

As Praat was designed to work specifically with audio files it also lets you convert them between various formats and edit some of their characteristics. As a result, you can export loaded audio files to FLAC, WAV, NIST, AIFF or AIFC formats but also to a raw endian file (16, 24 or 32-bit). Audio tracks can be converted to mono or stereo and you can also extract a specific channel (or all of them) and use a different frequency to resample it.