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Joined 2026-09-21 Message
Incoming links: David Weenink
David Weenink 2026-11-05
David Weenink co-created Praat with Paul Boersma, providing tools for measuring and modeling speech. His 2006 thesis investigated speaker-adaptive vowel identification: how recognition can remain useful when acoustic patterns vary between speakers.[ref]
Praat: doing phonetics by computer by Paul Boersma and David Weenink. Intro, authorship
[ref]The thesis describes recordings from 30 speakers, each producing 12 Dutch vowels in controlled sentence frames. It relates these data to formants, principal component analysis, discriminant analysis and adaptive classification methods. This makes the recognition problem experimentally concrete: a classifier must separate vowel identity from speaker-related variation rather than memorize a single speaker's frequency spectrum.[ref]
Speaker-adaptive vowel identification by David Weenink. Chapters1–3 and11;30-speaker/12-vowel data description
Homepage: www.fon.hum.uva.nl/david/
Paul Boersma 2026-11-05
Paul Boersma is a phonetician who co-created Praat with David Weenink. His work connects acoustic measurements to computational methods, including the estimation of fundamental frequency from sampled speech.[ref]
Praat: doing phonetics by computer by Paul Boersma and David Weenink. Intro, authorship
His 1993 periodicity-analysis paper examines how signal sampling and a finite analysis window affect estimates based on autocorrelation. Repetition produces peaks at nonzero time lags; locating a suitable peak gives a candidate period, while the relative peak height contains information about periodicity. Correcting the influence of the analysis window is important before interpreting those peaks as properties of the original signal.[ref]
Accurate short-term analysis of the fundamental frequency and the harmonics-to-noise ratio of a sampled sound by Paul Boersma. Sections1–3: autocorrelation, windowing and pitch-period estimation
Homepage: www.fon.hum.uva.nl/paul/
Praat 2026-11-05
Praat is software for analyzing, synthesizing, annotating and manipulating speech, created by Paul Boersma and David Weenink. It makes the connection between a recorded acoustic signal and measurable speech properties explicit: a waveform, a spectrogram, a pitch contour and estimated formants describe different aspects of the same recording.[ref]
Praat: doing phonetics by computer by Paul Boersma and David Weenink. Intro: capabilities, tutorials and authorship
For a sustained vowel, one can compare the repeating structure of the waveform with the estimated fundamental frequency, then examine how the frequency spectrum is shaped by the vocal tract. A change in vowel quality need not be a change in pitch. Annotations can align intervals with phonemes or syllables without treating every acoustic boundary as an unambiguous linguistic boundary.
Measurements depend on the analysis settings and the signal. In particular, a displayed pitch contour can contain octave errors, while estimated formants depend on the analysis model. Inspecting the recorded sound and analysis assumptions is therefore part of the experiment, rather than accepting every displayed trajectory as ground truth.