Some useful tools for computer aided phonetics

There are many researchers within the phonetic sciences that have compiled comprehensive and very useful lists of tools that they use for phonetics.¹ This small list doesn’t seek to replace these, but I will hopefully add to the knowledge base and give a few links to future tutorials relevent to the phonetician and data scientist.

Labeling and Segmenting

• Praat: Should be in every linguist’s toolbox.
• ELAN: from The Language Archive at MPI.
• Emu The webapp front end for the EmuR Speech Database Management System

Analysis and Graphical Representation

• R
• Rstudio: A development environment and GUI frontend for R
• various R packages including ggplot2 and the whole tidyverse suite of packages.
• Python

Report Generation

• LaTex specifically XeLaTex and MacTex 2016: although sometimes creates problems of its own but makes using Unicode in LaTex much simpler - and inputting IPA transcriptions.
• Markdown - for when I can’t be bothered with LaTex (read:always) - built into Rstudio with pandoc and is the smart way to write replicatable documents incorporating primary data analysis.

This is by no means an exhaustive list and will grow as time progresses.