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

Common Use Cases
Documentation
Tutorials
Version History
Requirements
Usage
Installation
Citing praatIO
Acknowledgements

Common Use Cases

What can you do with this library?

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

tg = tgio.openTextgrid("path_to_textgrid")
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 = tgio.openTextgrid("path_to_textgrid")
moddedTG = tg.editTimestamps(5)
moddedTG.save('output_path_to_textgrid')
```

utilize the klattgrid interface to raise all speech formants by 20% (among other possible manipulations)

kg = kgio.openKlaatGrid("path_to_klaatgrid")
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

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)

Ver 4.1 (May 13, 2020)

Textgrids can now be read "raw"
- For backwards compatibility, by default, unlabeled points and intervals are removed when opening textgrids

Ver 4.0 (February 5, 2020)

Removed unlicensed xsampa.py file, along with associated utility sppas_util.py (originally added in Ver 3.4)
- If you are not directly importing either of those files, you can upgrade without changing your code

Ver 3.8 (July 24, 2019)

Textgrids can be saved in the Textgrid long file format with .save(fn, useShortForm=False).
- For backwards compatibility, by default, it saves in the short file format.
Textgrid output formatting is now closer to what Praat outputs.

Ver 3.7 (March 17, 2019)

Speaker normalization and normalization within local context added to pitch and intensity query functions
Generated pdoc documentation added

Ver 3.6 (May 05, 2017)

Major clean up of tgio
- Ver 3.6 is not backwards compatible with previous versions of PraatIO. Lots of changes to tgio.
Tutorials folder added

Ver 3.5 (April 04, 2017)

Added code for reading, writing, and manipulating audio files (praatio.audioio)
eraseRegion() and insertRegion() added to textgrids and textgrid tiers

Ver 3.4 (February 04, 2017)

Added place for very specific scripts (praatio.applied_scripts)
- added code for using with input and output textgrids to SPPAS, a forced aligner
Lots of minor features and bugfixes

Ver 3.3 (June 27, 2016)

Find zero-crossings in a wave file
- for shifting all boundaries in a textgrid see praatio_scripts.tgBoundariesToZeroCrossings()
- for finding individual zero crossings, see praatio_scripts.findNearestZeroCrossing()
Pitch features
- pitch extraction is now ten times faster
- automatic pitch halving/doubling detection
- median filtering
Textgrid features
- set operations over two tiers (union, difference, or intersection)
- erase a section of a textgrid (and a section of the corresponding wave file)
Extraction of pitch formants using praat
Lots of small bugfixes

Ver 3.2 (January 29, 2016)

Float precision is now preserved in file I/O
Integration tests added; using Travis CI and Coveralls for build automation.
Lots of small bugfixes
Moved point processes into 1D and 2D point objects

Ver 3.1 (December 16, 2015)

Support for reading/writing point processes

Ver 3.0 (November 10, 2015)

Support for reading and writing klattgrids

Ver 2.1 (July 27, 2015)

Addition of praatio_scripts.py where commonly used scripts will be placed
Import clash led to praatio.py being renamed to tgio.py

Ver 2.0 (February 5, 2015)

Support for reading, writing, and manipulating point tiers
Ported to python 3
Major cleanup/reorganizing of code

Ver 1.0 (August 31, 2014)

Reading and writing of textgrids
Support for reading, writing, and manipulating interval tiers

Requirements

Python 2.6.* or above

Python 3.3.* or above (actually, probably any version of python 3)

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

Usage

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

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

Or if you want to work with KlaatGrid files

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

See /test for example usages

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:\Python36\python.exe setup.py install

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).