Pitch marks in Praat?

[Elisa G]

Hi there,

I would like to view my pitch marks, so I converted them into labels. I tried to open them with Praat, but it seems to not work.

How can I open them along with the corresponding waveform?

In case it’s not possible with Praat, but only with Wavesurfer, how do I do that??

Thanks!

[Korin Richmond]

I’m not a Praat user at all, so I cannot offer any advice on that I’m afraid.

With wavesurfer it is pretty easy though. Once you have converted your pitchmarks to the label file format (e.g. make_pmlab_pm pm/*.pm), just open Wavesurfer and load the wave file you want to view. You can either:

1) Just choose “Transcription” as the configuration option when initially opening the wave file. Wavesurfer will show the spectrogram and a transcription pane. To load the labels, right click in the transcription pane and select “load labels” and navigate to the correct label file.

2) Add labelling to any open view by right clicking to create another pane – choose Transcription. Then right click in that new pane to load the labels as above.

Tips: 1) if the “.lab” file is in the same directory as the corresponding .wav file, Wavesurfer will just load the labels automatically; 2) right click on the transcription pane and choose “properties” – you can then select to “Extend boundaries into waveform and spectrogram panes”, which can make label viewing better.

[Eric D]

Minor correction to Korin’s comment: when you right click the transcription pane, you should select “Load Transcription”, not “Load Labels”.

Regarding viewing the pitchmarks in Praat, I think I’ve figured it out with the help of this: https://praat-users.yahoogroups.co.narkive.com/BgITTW8v/display-f0-contours-from-other-programs

1. Make a copy of either the .pm or .lab file and remove the header of .pm (first few lines) or the first line of .lab (#).

2. In the Praat objects window, import the file with Open > Read Matrix from raw text file…

3. Select the file (called “Matrix <filename>”) and click Transpose in the right panel.

4. In the right panel, click Cast- > To PointProcess.

5. Select both the PointProcess object and the wav file (using the CMND key on Mac, and I think with CTRL on Windows) and click View & Edit in the right pane.

The pitch marks are in blue, and if auto scaling is on, it might be hard to differentiate between the pitch marks and the actual waveform. If that’s the case, try turning off auto scaling by going to View > Sound scaling… and change the scaling strategy to “by whole”. This makes it look comparable to WaveSurfer.

I’m not 100% sure if this is correct, but so far it seems ok.

[Author]

Posts