Wavesurfer vs Praat

[Emma K]

Is there a reason we’re using both Wavesurfer and Praat? Do both have fundamental features that the other lacks that we just haven’t come across yet?

[Simon]

It’s always good to know several tools.

I find Wavesurfer faster and easier to use, and it’s widely used in speech technology for tasks such as labelling speech. Praat is the more common tool in the field of phonetics, and is more powerful. Personally, I don’t like the way Praat labels the axes (it doesn’t provide tick marks).

Use whichever you prefer.

[Gonzalo V]

Provided that both Wavesurfer and Prat run at a sample rate of 16kHz –I guess the FFT spectrum shows up through the Nyqvist at 8k–, I wonder why this figure was standardized for the speech region.

[Simon]

The Nyquist frequency only depends on the sampling rate of the waveform you are analysing (and not on the software package you are using).

Wavesurfer always shows the spectrogram up to the Nyquist frequency.

Praat, by default, only shows up to 5kHz (even when the Nyquist frequency is higher than this value) because this band is of most interest for speech analysis. You can configure this in the spectrogram settings.

So, let me rephrase your question as

Why is 16kHz the most common sampling rate used for speech waveforms?

and see if you can answer that…

[Author]

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