Praat 6.0.25

Praat is a great software package written and maintained by David Weenink and Paul Boersma of the University of Amsterdam. Free to use, with open source code, there is simply no superior package for linguists to use in analyzing speech.

To generate a short list of what this means, Praat allows you to achieve spectral, formant, pitch and intensity examination, as well as examine jitter, shimmer or voice breaks.

Speech analysis:

- spectral analysis (spectrograms)
- pitch study
- formant study
- intensity study
- shimmer, jitter, voice breaks
- cochleagram
- excitation pattern

Speech synthesis:

- from pitch, formant, and intensity
- Klatt acoustic synthesis
- articulatory synthesis

Labelling and segmentation:

- label intervals or time marks on many levels
- use phonetic alphabet
- use sound documents of almost 2 gigabytes (3 hours)

Speech customization:

- customize pitch or length contours
- filtering

Learning algorithms:

- feedforward neural networks
- stochastic and discrete Optimality Theory

Statistics:

- multidimensional scaling
- main component analysis
- discriminant analysis