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Compute spectral moments using Praat

praat_moments.Rd

This function takes a sound file, or an indicated part of a sound file, and computes the first (Center of gravity), second (Standard deviation), third (skewness), and fourth (kurtosis) spectral moments at regular intervals. The moments are stored as separate tracks in an SSFF signal object on disk, or optionally returned as an object (toFile=FALSE).

Usage

praat_moments(
  listOfFiles,
  beginTime = NULL,
  endTime = NULL,
  windowShift = 5,
  windowSize = 25,
  freqBinSize = 20,
  power = 2,
  maximumFrequency = NULL,
  windowShape = "Gaussian1",
  relativeWidth = 1,
  toFile = TRUE,
  explicitExt = "pmo",
  outputDirectory = NULL,
  verbose = FALSE,
  praat_path = NULL
)

Arguments

listOfFiles

The full paths of the files to be processed.

beginTime

The start time of the portion of a wave that should be included. This argument needs to be either be a single value or a vector of the same length as listOfFiles.

endTime

The end time of the portion of a wave that should be included. Like beginTime this argument needs to be either be a single value or a vector of the same length as listOfFiles.

windowShift

The time step between (time) analysis windows (in ms).

windowSize

The size of the time aligned analysis window (in ms).

freqBinSize

The spectral resolution.

power

The power to be used when computing the spectral moments. If power=1 the spectral moments will be computed from the absolute spectrum, and if power=2 they will be computed based on the power spectrum.

maximumFrequency

The cutoff frequency (in Hz) used when computing the spectrum. Frequencies above this cutoff will not be included when computing spectral moments.

windowShape

The window type used for extracting a section of the wave file for analysis. Permitted values are "rectangular", "triangular", "parabolic", "Hanning", "Hamming", "Gaussian1", "Gaussian2", "Gaussian3", "Gaussian4", "Gaussian5", "Kaiser1", and "Kaiser2". See the Praat manual for a descriptio of these window shapes.

relativeWidth

The relative width of the windowing function used for extracting part of the sound file.

toFile

Should the SSFF signal tracks be store on disk or returned?

explicitExt

The signal file extension.

outputDirectory

Where should the signal file be stored. If NULL, the signal file will be stored in the same directory as the wave file.

verbose

Produce verbose output?

praat_path

The location where the Praat executable is stored.

Value

An SSFF file (if toFile=FALSE), or nothing.

Details

By default, the moments are based on the entire spectrum of the sound file, which means that they will depend on the sampling frequency of the file. The user may however choose to include just a portion of the spectrum up to a cutoff frequency if required. This way, the user may opt to limit the analysis to half of the smallest sampling rate for a collection of sound files and thereby produce comparable results.