15th International Congress of Phonetic Sciences (ICPhS-15)

Barcelona, Spain
August 3-9, 2003


Building an Interface Between EMU and Praat: A Modular Approach to Speech Database Analysis

Jonathan Harrington (1), Steve Cassidy (2), Tina John (1), Michel Scheffers (1)

(1) University of Kiel, Germany
(2) Macquarie University, Australia

In this paper, we demonstrate the advantages of combining the largely complementary systems of Praat, a computational system for doing phonetics, with the EMU system for speech database analysis. The interface applies to the annotations in which a Praat TextGrid is converted into an EMU hierarchical annotation structure and vice-versa. With the exception of annotations in EMU that are not explicitly linked to times, we show that there is no loss of information in this conversion. The interface between the Praat and EMU systems provides a flexible labelling system: the data can be labelled as segments or events in Praat and various kinds of structures between annotation tiers can be defined and then queried within EMU. We argue that both the variety of existing speech databases as well as the multitude of different possible types of speech analysis require a modular approach allowing the integration of a number of different stand-alone components that are adapted to different aspects of creating, annotation, querying and analysing speech data.

Full Paper

Bibliographic reference.  Harrington, Jonathan / Cassidy, Steve / John, Tina / Scheffers, Michel (2003): "Building an interface between EMU and Praat: a modular approach to speech database analysis", In ICPhS-15, 355-358.