Appends measurements from Praat to a dataframe of matches.

This is a version of processWithPraat that can have a dataframe of matches piped into it, and returns the dataframe with columns appended.

Usage

appendFromPraat(
  matches,
  start.column,
  end.column,
  praat.script,
  window.offset,
  gender.attribute = "participant_gender",
  attributes = NULL,
  no.progress = FALSE,
  labbcat.url = NULL,
  column.prefix = NULL
)

Arguments

matches: A dataframe returned by getMatches or getAllUtterances, identifying the results to which acoustic measurments should be appended.
start.column: The column of matches containing the start time in seconds.
end.column: The column of matches containing the end time in seconds.
praat.script: Script to run on each match. This may be a single string or a character vector.
window.offset: In many circumstances, you will want some context before and after the sample start/end time. For this reason, you can specify a "window offset" - this is a number of seconds to subtract from the sample start and add to the sample end time, before extracting that part of the audio for processing. For example, if the sample starts at 2.0s and ends at 3.0s, and you set the window offset to 0.5s, then Praat will extract a sample of audio from 1.5s to 3.5s, and do the selected processing on that sample. The best value for this depends on what the praat.script is doing; if you are getting formants from vowels, including some context ensures that the formants at the edges are more accurate (in LaBB-CAT's web interface, the default value for this 0.025), but if you're getting max pitch or COG during a segment, most likely you want a window.offset of 0 to ensure neighbouring segments don't influence the measurement.
gender.attribute: Which participant attribute represents the participant's gender.
attributes: Vector of participant attributes to make available to the script. For example, if you want to use different acoustic parameters depending on what the gender of the speaker is, including the "participant_gender" attribute will make a variable called participant_gender$ available to the praat script, whose value will be the gender of the speaker of that segment.
no.progress: TRUE to suppress visual progress bar. Otherwise, progress bar will be shown when interactive().
labbcat.url: URL to the LaBB-CAT instance (instead of inferring it from matches).
column.prefix: A string to prefix each new column name with.

Value

matches with the acoustic measurements appended as new columns.

Details

It instructs the LaBB-CAT server to invoke Praat for a set of sound intervals, in order to extract acoustic measures.

The exact measurements to return depend on the praat.script that is invoked. This is a Praat script fragment that will run once for each sound interval specified.

There are functions to allow the generation of a number of pre-defined praat scripts for common tasks such as formant, pitch, intensity, and centre of gravity – see praatScriptFormants, praatScriptCentreOfGravity, praatScriptIntensity and praatScriptPitch.

You can provide your own script, either by building a string with your code, or loading one from a file.

LaBB-CAT prefixes praat.script with code to open a sound file and extract a defined part of it into a Sound object which is then selected.

LaBB-CAT Remove's this Sound object after the script finishes executing. Any other objects created by the script must be Remove'd before the end of the script (otherwise Praat runs out of memory during very large batches)

LaBB-CAT assumes that all calls to the function 'print' correspond to fields for export and each field must be printed on its own line. Specifically it scans for lines of the form:

print 'myOutputVariable' 'newline$'

Variables that can be assumed to be already set in the context of the script are:

windowOffset – the value used for the Window Offset; how much context to include.
windowAbsoluteStart – the start time of the window extracted relative to the start of the original audio file.
windowAbsoluteEnd – the end time of the window extracted relative to the start of the original audio file.
windowDuration – the duration of the window extracted (including window offset).
targetAbsoluteStart – the start time of the target interval relative to the start of the original audio file.
targetAbsoluteEnd – the end time of the target interval relative to the start of the original audio file.
targetStart – the start time of the target interval relative to the start of the window extracted.
targetEnd – the end time of the target interval relative to the start of the window extracted.
targetDuration – the duration of the target interval.
sampleNumber – the number of the sample within the set of samples being processed.
sampleName$ – the name of the extracted/selected Sound object.

Examples

if (FALSE) { # \dontrun{
## Get all tokens of /I/
results <- getMatches(labbcat.url, list(segment="I")) |>
    appendFromPraat( ## get F1 and F2 for the mid point of the vowel
       Target.segment.start, Target.segment.end, # for the vowel
       praatScriptFormants(),
       window.offset=0.5) ## get F1 and F2

## Get all tokens of /i:/
results <- getMatches(labbcat.url, list(segment="i")) |>
   appendFromPraat(
       Target.segment.start, Target.segment.end, ## for the target vowel...
       paste(
           ## ... get first 3 formants at three points during the sample ...
           praatScriptFormants(c(1,2,3), c(0.25,0.5,0.75)),
           ## ... the mean, min, and max pitch ...
           praatScriptPitch(get.mean=TRUE, get.minimum=TRUE, get.maximum=TRUE),
           ## ... the max intensity ...
           praatScriptIntensity(),
           ## ... and the CoG using powers 1 and 2 
           praatScriptCentreOfGravity(powers=c(1.0,2.0))),
       window.offset=0.5)

## Get all tokens of /s/
results <- getMatches(labbcat.url, list(segment="s")) |>
   appendFromPraat(
       Target.segment.start, Target.segment.end,
       readLines("acousticMeasurements.praat")) ## execute a custom script loaded form a file
} # }