PraatR : An architecture for controlling the phonetics software “ Praat ” with the R programming language

An increasing number of researchers are using the R programming language (http://www.r-project.org/) for the visualization and statistical modeling of acoustic-phonetic data. However, R's digital signal processing capabilities are still limited compared to free-standing phonetics software such as Praat(http://www.fon.hum.uva.nl/praat/). As such, it is typical to extract the acoustic measurements in Praat, export the data to a textfile, and then import this file into R for analysis. This process of manually shuttling data from one program to the other slows down and complicates the analysis workflow. The present work reports on a software architecture ("PraatR") designed to overcome this inefficiency. Each of its R functions sends a shell command to the operating system that invokes the command-line form of Praat with an associated Praat script that imports a file, applies a Praatcommand to it, and then either brings the output directly into R or exports the output as a textfile. Since all arguments are passed from R to Praat, the full functionality of the original Praat command is available inside R, making it possible to conduct the entire analysis within a single environment. Moreover, with the combined power of these two programs, many new analyses become possible. Further information on PraatR can be found at the author's website.