Fast Track: fast (nearly) automatic formant-tracking using Praat
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Santiago Barreda
Abstract
Fast Track is a formant tracker implemented in Praat that attempts to automatically select the best analysis from a set of candidates. The best track is selected by modeling smooth formant contours across the entirety of the sound, providing the researcher with rich information about static and dynamic formant properties. Fast Track returns text files containing acoustic information (formant frequencies, formant bandwidths, fundamental frequency, etc.) sampled every 2 ms, generates images showing the winning analysis and comparing alternate analyses, and creates log files detailing analysis information for each file. Fast Track features a modular workflow that allows for analysis steps to be run (and re-run) independently as necessary, and is designed to allow for easy correction of tracking errors by allowing the user to override the automatic analysis, or manually edit tracks where necessary. In addition, Fast Track includes tools to aggregate data across tokens, and to easily create vowel plots of mean values or time-varying formant contours. The design and use of Fast Track are outlined using a re-analysis of the Hillenbrand et al. (1995) dataset, which suggests that Fast Track can be very accurate in cases where signal properties allow for reliable formant estimates.
References
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© 2021 Walter de Gruyter GmbH, Berlin/Boston
Articles in the same Issue
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Articles in the same Issue
- Editorial Note
- Editorial note
- Phonetics & Phonology
- Fast Track: fast (nearly) automatic formant-tracking using Praat
- Acoustic investigation of anticipatory vowel nasalization in a Caribbean and a non-Caribbean dialect of Spanish
- Evidence against a link between learning phonotactics and learning phonological alternations
- The extent and degree of utterance-final word lengthening in spontaneous speech from 10 languages
- Morphology & Syntax
- Brand names as multimodal constructions
- NP-internal structure and the distribution of adjectives in Mə̀dʉ́mbὰ
- A quantitative investigation of the ellipsis of English relativizers
- Positional dependency in Murrinhpatha: expanding the typology of non-canonical morphotactics
- Semantics & Pragmatics
- Multifactorial Information Management (MIM): summing up the emerging alternative to Information Structure
- Language Documentation & Typology
- Current trends in grammar writing
- Psycholinguistics & Neurolinguistics
- Experimental filler design influences error correction rates in a word restoration paradigm
- Phonological and morphological roles modulate the perception of consonant variants
- Language Acquisition and Language Learning
- Sounds like a dynamic system: a unifying approach to Language
- Sociolinguistics and Anthropological Linguistics
- Using hidden Markov models to find discrete targets in continuous sociophonetic data
- “It’s a Whole Vibe”: testing evaluations of grammatical and ungrammatical AAE on Twitter
- The sociolinguistics of /l/ in Manchester
- Computational & Corpus Linguistics
- An empirical study on the contribution of formal and semantic features to the grammatical gender of nouns
- A computational construction grammar approach to semantic frame extraction
- The “negative end” of change in grammar: terminology, concepts and causes
- In order that – a data-driven study of symptoms and causes of obsolescence
- Cognitive Linguistics
- Iconicity ratings really do measure iconicity, and they open a new window onto the nature of language
- Iconicity ratings really do measure iconicity, and they open a new window onto the nature of language
- Repetition in Mandarin-speaking children’s dialogs: its distribution and structural dimensions
