Run Praat in R

Run a Praat script

To run a Praat script, use the function praat_run(). The first argument of the function is the path to the script.

For example:

script <- system.file("extdata", "play-greetings.praat", package = "speakr")

praat_run(script)

If the script has side effects, like creating new files or editing existing ones, these effects will take place.

File output

If the script logs text (like a set of acoustic measurements) to a file (with writeFile[Line] and appendFile[Line]), the file is created in the directory specified in the script, and nothing is returned in R. To load the results file in R, just read it in as you would with any other dataset.

The following runs a script that gets formant values and outputs a file with the formant measurements in your home folder.

script <- system.file("extdata", "get-formants.praat", package = "speakr")

praat_run(script)

Praat Info window output

If, on the other hand, the script logs output to the Info window (with writeInfo[Line] and appendInfo[Line]), the output will be sent to the R console.

script <- system.file("extdata", "get-formants-capt.praat", package = "speakr")

# Output to R console
praat_run(script)

#> vowel,F1,F2,F3 a,784.4671170665314,1390.927070235929,2433.2403445805335 e,417.00791908249613,2042.453249988405,2423.8583300060627 i,259.0985814360339,2231.740765785137,2819.218714861659 o,562.2955245317842,854.5311682738487,2463.26727657427 u,434.4420321283883,1331.362161871936,2815.9876831692327

You can use capture = TRUE in praat_run() to capture the output and pass it to an R variable. The output will be a character string.

# Output to R variable
formants <- praat_run(script, capture = TRUE)
cat(formants)

#> vowel,F1,F2,F3 a,784.4671170665314,1390.927070235929,2433.2403445805335 e,417.00791908249613,2042.453249988405,2423.8583300060627 i,259.0985814360339,2231.740765785137,2819.218714861659 o,562.2955245317842,854.5311682738487,2463.26727657427 u,434.4420321283883,1331.362161871936,2815.9876831692327

Of course, you can redirect the captured output using the pipe |>, for example to read the output as a tibble.

# Output to R tibble
formants <- praat_run(script, capture = TRUE) |>
  read_csv()
class(formants)
glimpse(formants)

#> Rows: 5 Columns: 4
#> ── Column specification ────────────────────────────────────────────────────────
#> Delimiter: ","
#> chr (1): vowel
#> dbl (3): F1, F2, F3
#> 
#> ℹ Use `spec()` to retrieve the full column specification for this data.
#> ℹ Specify the column types or set `show_col_types = FALSE` to quiet this message.
#> [1] "spec_tbl_df" "tbl_df"      "tbl"         "data.frame"
#> Rows: 5
#> Columns: 4
#> $ vowel <chr> "a", "e", "i", "o", "u"
#> $ F1    <dbl> 784.4671, 417.0079, 259.0986, 562.2955, 434.4420
#> $ F2    <dbl> 1390.9271, 2042.4532, 2231.7408, 854.5312, 1331.3622
#> $ F3    <dbl> 2433.240, 2423.858, 2819.219, 2463.267, 2815.988

Script arguments using Praat forms

It is possible to pass arguments to the script from R, using Praat forms in the script. The following example runs the script get-formants-args.praat, which requires two arguments: unit (a string, either "Hertz" or "Bark") and window size (a number). Multiple arguments can be specified in praat_run(), in the order in which they appear in the form. These arguments will be passed to the form in the script.

script <- system.file("extdata", "get-formants-args.praat", package = "speakr")

unit = "Bark"
window = 0.02

f_bark <- praat_run(script, unit, window, capture = TRUE) |>
  read_csv()
attr(f_bark, "args") <- list(unit = unit, window = window)

#> Rows: 5 Columns: 4
#> ── Column specification ────────────────────────────────────────────────────────
#> Delimiter: ","
#> chr (1): vowel
#> dbl (3): F1, F2, F3
#> 
#> ℹ Use `spec()` to retrieve the full column specification for this data.
#> ℹ Specify the column types or set `show_col_types = FALSE` to quiet this message.

Let’s have a look at f_bark.

f_bark
#> # A tibble: 5 × 4
#>   vowel    F1    F2    F3
#>   <chr> <dbl> <dbl> <dbl>
#> 1 a      7.16 10.5   14.2
#> 2 e      4.24 13.0   14.2
#> 3 i      2.72 13.6   15.2
#> 4 o      5.46  7.61  14.3
#> 5 u      4.28  9.12  15.1

And plot it.

f_bark |>
  ggplot(aes(F2, F1, label = vowel)) +
  geom_label(size = 10) +
  labs(
    title = "Vowel plot",
    x = "F2 (Bark)",
    y = "F1 (Bark)"
  ) +
  scale_x_reverse(position = "top", limits = c(14, 7)) +
  scale_y_reverse(position = "right", limits = c(8, 2))