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So I have a sound file from which I want to extract intensity of stop consonants, namely
of /p/, /t/, /k/, /b/, /d/ and /g/. And I also would like to get the intensity of /s/,
which I will to compare to that of the stop consonants. So to do that, I will first need
to break this sound file that I have into smaller segments, each containing one of the
consonants between two vowels. Then, I will be able to annotate each of the smaller sound
files by labeling the consonant and the following vowel and compare the intensity thereof. So
here the folder called AD1, I have the sound file that I will use, along with some other
files that I will use later. So let's open this sound file in Praat. I launch Praat and
I click Open. And because the sound file is quite large, I will open it as a long sound
file, so I click Open long sound file... Frog story.wav. And I click Open. And then I click
View to view it. So here you can see the the waveform of the sound file. I can use these
buttons in the bottom left corner of the window to zoom in or out. I can also zoom in by pressing
Command-I on Mac or Control-I on Windows. And similarly, I can zoom out by pressing
Command-O or Control-O. I can also select a part of the file with my mouse and zoom
in on that segment by pressing Command-N or Control-N. And if I zoom in close enough,
I can also see the spectrogram. And to make sure that Praat runs as fast as possible on
your computer, you might want to disable pitch, which is this blue line, formants, which are
these red dots, and the intensity, which is the yellow line. So to do that, I click Pitch
and uncheck show pitch, Format and uncheck show formants. And I can also click here and
uncheck show intensity, but I will leave it checked because the intensity line will help
me to find the stop constants that I'm looking for. If you are using a Mac with a trackpad,
you can also pinch to zoom in or out and you can swipe with two fingers to scroll left
or right. Or instead you can just use the scroll bar on the bottom of the window. I
can play the visible part of the file by clicking here on the bottom. ...y nada, está el niño
tan feliz con su rana y el perro muy sorpre... I can also select a part of the file and play
the selection by pressing the Tab on my keyboard. ...el niño tan feliz... Let's zoom out to
see the whole file by pressing Command-A or Control-A on Windows. As you can see, the
waveform is not visible because the window is longer than 60 seconds. Anyway, I need
to find words with consonants /p/, /t/, /k/, /b/, /d/, /g/ and /s/ between vowels, so let's
find three such words. I know there's a word with a /p/ somewhere around here... And let's
listen to this selection. ...iñeta pues... ...iñeta pues... And there you have it. The
consonant /p/ in the word pues. I can save this selection by clicking File > Save selected
sound as WAV file... And I will create a folder where I will put all the segments. And I'll
call that folder "segments." And I will name the file p_, because /p/ is the consonant
in my segment, iñetapues, because that's what the speaker is saying, and .wav. And
make sure not to use any diacritics, such as accent marks or tildes, in your file names,
otherwise you might run into problems later. And I click Save to save the segment. Now
let's find a word with a /g/ between two vowels. And I think there happens to be such a word
right before the one we just found. And let's listen to this segment. ...y en la siguien...
And I think the word is this one. ...siguiente vi... ...siguiente... And that is the word
siguiente. So let's save the selection. File > Save selected sound as WAV file... And let's
call it g_siguiente.wav and let's click Save. Let's find a word with an /s/. And I believe
there's one somewhere around here. And let's check. ...básicamente es... ...básicamente...
...básicamente... ...básicamente... So the word básicamente has an /s/ between two vowels.
And let's save this segment. File > Save selected sound as WAV file... s_basikamente.wav. And
notice how I did not the accent mark on the first a even though the word básicamente
is spelled with one. Save. So that's how you can select parts of a sound file with consonants
between two vowels and save them as a WAV file.