Tutorial on Phonetics and Speech Analysis
Utrecht UniversityDocument compiled 20 Mar 2025 22:30
Preface
Aims
In this tutorial you will learn about acoustics (sounds), phonetics (speech), and speech analysis. You will learn the core concepts in these related fields, as well as the necessary practical skills for speech analysis. The aim of this tutorial is to provide you with the phonetic insights and skills in speech analysis that you need to succesfully conduct phonetic research in your own project (e.g. paper or thesis). This tutorial is also intended to be used as a guide in introductory courses in phonetics and speech analysis.
Under construction
This tutorial is a work in progress, resulting from an ongoing revision of an existing tutorial, and meanwhile incorporating other modules and resources.
The existing (outdated) full tutorial is still available at https://resources.lab.hum.uu.nl/resources/phonetics/index.html .
More details on the ancestry of this tutorial guide are provided below.
How to use this tutorial
You will learn the most from this tutorial if you
- read the explanatory texts in this tutorial,
- work through the questions and exercises provided,
- practice in applying your new knowledge hands-on, with the
Praatcomputer program (detailed below), and - re-read the relevant sections from this tutorial and your textbook, with the help of keywords provided per section.
Questions
Text blocks such as this one will contain questions or exercises inviting you to engage with the tutorial. You will learn most if you attempt to answer these questions (preferably in writing) before you proceed and before you take a look at the answer provided. (These questions only work in the HTML version of the tutorial; other versions will just show both the question and answer subsequently.)
Question 0.1
What is sound?
Answer 0.1
Sound is a type of energy that travels through a medium (such as air, water, or solid materials) in the form of waves. These sound waves are created by the vibration of objects, which causes the surrounding particles in the medium to move in a back-and-forth motion. This movement, or vibration, transfers energy through the medium, creating waves of high and low pressure.
Recommended software
In this tutorial you will work mostly with Praat (Boersma and Weenink 2024)1. This is a popular open-source program for the analysis of speech, developed by Paul Boersma and David Weenink (both at University of Amsterdam). It can be found on its own website (https://www.praat.org), where you will find a wealth of helpful documentation. Praat also has extensive Help built in, including a full tutorial.
There is an online forum (https://groups.io/g/Praat-Users-List), where users share their knowledge by posting questions and providing answers.
In order to install Praat on your computer, go to its webpage at https://www.praat.org/, and then proceed to the download page for the operating system of your computer. Follow the installation instructions on the download page for your operating system.
Instructions for using Praat
Text blocks such as this one will contain instructions about how to “do” things in Praat.
Options in software menus, as well as texts in on-screen buttons, will be shown in this way.
The notation Main > Sub means: first choose option Main from the main menu, after which a submenu will appear, then choose option Sub from the submenu.
Commands or formulas that you have to type will be shown in this way too. (Commands typically need to be terminated with typing Enter or Return or ␍ or ⏎ – which however will not be specified in the instructions.)
0.1 Recommended textbooks
This tutorial guide is intended to be used in addition to one or more textbooks in phonetics, to which this tutorial will provide additional background knowledge. Some excellent textbooks and introductions in phonetics are those by Rietveld and Heuven (2009) (in Dutch), Johnson (2012), Ladefoged and Johnson (2015), Reetz and Jongman (2020), Beňuš (2021), and Zsiga (2024).
Structure of this tutorial
TODO add structure description and pointers: Part I sounds (acoustics), Part II speech (phonetics), Part III ??
Details
License
This work is licensed under the GNU GPL 3 license (for details see https://www.gnu.org/licenses/gpl-3.0.en.html).
History
This work is based on an earlier tutorial (2006-2007) titled Tutorial for self study: basics of phonetics and how to use Praat by Clizia Welker and Hugo Quené. In turn, that 2007 tutorial was partly based on older texts by Hugo Quené, Denise Bruin and Mirjam Wester (1996-2000); these older texts acknowledged valuable comments and suggestions by Paul Boersma, Olga van Herwijnen, Kim Koppen, Eva Sittig, Joyce Vliegen and Mieke van Wijck.
The 2007 version of the tutorial was subsequently revised and adapted to the current version using R Markdown (Xie, Allaire, and Grolemund 2018) and bookdown (Xie 2025) in Rstudio by Hugo Quené in 2024–2025. Relevant parts of older lab instructions were integrated in the main text of the present tutorial guide, where appropriate. These older instructions were written or revised earlier by a.o. Gerrit Bloothooft, Peter Pabon, Willemijn Heeren, Silvia Terenghi, Aleksei Nazarov, and Sanne Ditewig.
Acknowledgements
As indicated in the History subsection above, this text has been built upon older works, which in turn have benefited from text portions and from a wealth of earlier comments and suggestions. This work stands on the shoulders of many colleagues mentioned above.
In addition, I am thankful for the helpful comments and suggestions to improve this tutorial text: thank you Jing Tang!
References
The Dutch word praat /ˈpraːt/ means “talk”.↩︎