Auto-Chunking Audio Files into Intonational Phrases

author: T. Mark Ellison date: 2017-05-01

tags: - Segmentation - Intonational Phrase - Silence - PRAAT

categories: - Tips

Introduction

Eri Kashima and I have found a neat way of chunking speech from the audio file, as a first step in transcription. Initial efforts using silence-detection in ELAN were not successful. Instead, we found that PRAAT’s silence detection did the job quite well once the right parameters were chosen.

We use PRAAT’s Annotate >> To TextGrid (silences)… option from the PRAAT file window. This option is available once you have loaded the .wav file. Our parameter settings are:

• Minimum pitch 70Hz

• Silence threshold (dB): -35

• Minimum silent interval duration(s): 0.25

• Minimum sounding interval duration(s): 0.1

• Silent interval label: (empty)

• Sounding interval label: ***

A detailed walkthrough - of chunking by PRAAT for a file normally explored in ELAN - can be seen on Eri’s blog page on the topic.