How to's | SPEAC | Hans Rutger Bosker

Table of Contents

The how-to’s shared here are first and foremost intended as a lab archive, providing some starting ground for tasks and documents we often deal with. This means they require customization for each individual new project. Use at your own risk!

So how do I…

...record speech

We’ll cover making clean audio recordings in Audacity and in SpeechRecorder. Audacity is easy-to-use and perfect for making a single (long) recording of a speaker. SpeechRecorder presents individual word/sentence prompts to a speaker, saving each utterance separately.
...generate speech

This shows you how to generate speech (speech synthesis) using text-to-speech from Elevenlabs. We’ll take a list of prompts as input and generate individual .mp3 files for each prompt. We’ll also automatically perform forced-alignment on the output speech using WebMAUS, giving you accompanying TextGrid files with word-level, syllable-level, and phoneme-level annotations.
...do forced-alignment

This shows you how to perform forced-alignment using WebMAUS. It takes pairs of sound files + text files with the same filename (item1.wav + item1.txt) as input and matches the orthographic words in the txt file to the sounds, syllables, and words in the sound file.
...annotate in Praat

We’ll cover making TextGrid annotations in Praat. We’ll read a wav file in Praat, create an empty TextGrid with several tiers, add boundaries delimiting individual words and phonemes in the recording, and save the annotations to a TextGrid file.
...script in Praat

Here’s a brief intro into the Praat scripting language. We’ll cover how to write and run a script, point you to some tutorials, highlight some of the strange quirks in the Praat scripting language, and provide some scripts we find useful ourselves.
...run a power analysis

This R script runs a simulation-based power analysis for a simple 2AFC experimental design. This is by no means a one-size-fits-all solution to all your power needs. Use at your own risk!
...write a paper

Here’s a Word template that includes all basic sections of a paper, template statements (e.g., ethics, participants specs, etc.), ‘fields’ to automatically update figure/table numbers, heading styles, and Zotero for reference management.
...submit a manuscript

This describes which journal to choose, which suggested (or dispreferred?) reviewers to mention, what should go into a cover letter, how to read the submission system, and when to contact the editorial office about your submission.
...reply to reviews

This talks about when to open that email that contains your fresh reviews, how to weigh the reviewers’ feedback, how to respond, and how best to structure your response file.

License

All documents are shared under an MIT license.

2024, Hans Rutger Bosker