Automated Praat Segmentation
- Neel Byrappagari
- Jul 30, 2024
- 2 min read

For a little over a month, I have been working with Dr. Nancy Hall at CSULB Phonetics Lab on their Ho-Chunk analysis project. Mainly, I have been working on annotating elicitation reels that were recorded by Kenneth Miner, a linguist who worked extensively with the language in the late 20th century. More specifically, I have been using Praat software to segment individual sounds within a word. This process is relatively easy to learn - I needed around 10-15 hours before I was able to segment accurately - but it is incredibly time consuming. I’ve only worked on a few full reels so far, but each of them takes anywhere from 10-20 hours to fully segment. I’ve tried looking into software to automate the process. The best one I found was something called EasyAlign. However, it seems clunky and extremely outdated and also is only calibrated on a few languages such as English, French, and Spanish. I found one research paper that offered me a link to download the software, but the link seems to no longer work, which goes to show that the software is probably well out of date by now. I’m surprised there isn’t a more general solution. At least in my experience, most of the shifts between sounds are very distinct, and the software would only need to identify where the shift occurs. Even if it can’t figure out the exact sound, simply identifying where the sounds start and end would save a lot of time and also work for almost any language without need for calibration. I was wondering if anyone knew anything like this, please let me know in the comments.
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