Guide to lab computing

All Lab workstations automatically mount shared disk space as the guest user. This shared space is often referred to as the PDrive since it is mounted as drive letter P: on Windows.

Printing

The Lab printer is a Xerox Phaser 3250 and is located in 51 for Fall 2013. Lab workstations are set up to print to this printer automatically. You can choose '2-sided' (default), '1-sided', or '2-sided 2-up' when you print. Follow the setup instructions if you would like to print from your own computer.

For troubleshooting see the printer manual.

Tools and libraries

Local tools

• ifcformant -- a command line tool for extracting formant measurements, as described in Ueda, Yuichi; Hamakawa, Tomoya; Sakata, Tadashi; Hario, Syota Hario; Watanabe, Akira (2007) A real-time formant tracker based on the inverse filter control method, Acoustical Science and Technology of the Acoustical Science of Japan 28(4), 271-4. We are grateful to Yuichi Ueda for providing the C code which implements the algorithm. The user interface is provided by a Python wrapper around the authors' C code and was written by Ronald Sprouse.

Lab members can contact Ronald Sprouse for copies of ifcformant compiled for OS X, Windows, or Linux systems. Unfortunately we do not have permission to distribute the C code or compiled versions of this tool to the public.

For detailed usage information, run:

ifcformant --help

• convertlabel -- a command line tool for converting between Praat textgrids, ESPS label files, and Wavesurfer label files. You can also scale or shift timepoints in the label file by a specified amount. Written by Ronald Sprouse.

For detailed usage information, run:

convertlabel --help

Local libraries

• audiolabel -- a Python library for reading and writing Praat textgrids, ESPS label files, Wavesurfer label files, and time-aligned tabular data. Special access methods for retrieving labels at specified times or by matching label content. Written by Ronald Sprouse, and available on [github].

• SoundLabel.pm -- a Perl library for reading and writing Praat textgrids, ESPS label files, and Wavesurfer label files, written by Ronald Sprouse. Old and clunky API. You are encouraged to write scripts that use audiolabel instead.

Handy third-party tools

• ffmpeg -- a command line tool for transcoding video and audio

• sox -- 'the Swiss Army knife of sound processing programs'; a command line tool for audio processing. See the sox in phonetic research page for sample usages.

Sample scripts

• meas_formants -- a Python script for reading a Praat textgrid and performing formant analysis on vowel tokens

• sox cookbook for phonetics -- not exactly a script; a page describing scriptable ways to use sox that are useful for phoneticians