Click and drag in the window to select the blackish parts on the left. So let’s zoom in on what we’re interested in. Why is it all scrunched up on the left, though? That’s because the entire file is displayed in the window, and with the exception of the very beginning, most of the file is silence. The pitch contour is the one we’re interested in. The one on the bottom is a spectrogram, which is also where the pitch contour will be displayed. This will bring up a new window that looks like this: (OK, now I’m taking this really slow for those of you that might be intimidated by a piece of “linguistic software,” but I should point out that all we’ve done so far, really, is (1) open Praaat, (2) open an audio file, (3) click on edit.) Select “Edit” from the menu at the right: Now “Sound da4” should be highlighted in blue. I choose the fourth-tone word “dà” (meaning “big”) and open it. (Because the tone drills are freely available for download, you can reproduce this exact example, if you wish.) In the downloadable file, there’s a directory called “1-Char Adj” which has several monosyllabic word examples for each of Mandarin’s four main tones. For this, I can turn to my Mandarin Chinese Tone Pair Drills. To keep things simple, though, I want to open a file which contains only one spoken Mandarin syllable. In the left window, click on “Read” in the top menu, then select “Read from file…”.įrom here you can open various sound files, such as. We’re just going to ignore that one on the right, because we’re not going to use it. OK, perhaps not the most user-friendly interface in the world, but don’t worry. When you open Praat, you see two windows like this: The current version is 5.0.04, so that’s the one I’ll be using in all my screenshots. It works on Windows, Mac, Linux, and all kinds of platforms. Using Praat to See the Tones of Mandarin Chineseĭownload Praat.
#Download praat for mac how to
I’m going to show you how to do this yourself in a few easy steps so that you can stop accepting this “tone contour” stuff on faith alone.
#Download praat for mac software
The reality, however, is that pitch contour is incredibly easy to see, thanks to a piece of free linguistic software called Praat.
Whatever.” He then decides to accept the chart, no matter how helpful or useless he happens to find it, and move on. Are they just some artist’s conception of how the tones sound that everyone ended up agreeing on? No, actually, they’re tone contours, the result of linguistic research into the pitch contour of the various tones of Mandarin Chinese.Īt this point, your average language student is going, “oh, right, pitch contour. You may have wondered where these lines came from. You are invariably shown some variation of the chart on the right. When you first start studying Chinese, you are introduced to Mandarin’s four main tones.
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