Week 2: Preparations for Analysis (or, Praat Scripts and Manuscripts)

Hello, all! This week, I’ve made progress preparing to analyze the data. First, I’ve been looking into specifics on using Praat and FastTrack, and have found success with each. Praat, it turns out, is actually very easy to use. It can perform many very useful operations, and it didn’t take much digging to find, for example, how one might import a sound and measure the minimum F3 (3rd formant—see Week 1). The Praat scripting language is also very intuitive. It’s generally structured such that if you can do something in the GUI, then you’ll be able to automate it with a script without much trouble. With FastTrack, I’ve conducted some tests going through the methods of formant measurement I’ll be using, and managed to get data out of some test audio. Now, the challenge from there will just be to automate the process for multiple audio files at a time. 

I also read through Lipari’s “The Acoustics of Borrowed /ɚ/ in Quebec French”, and it turned out to be very interesting. For space, I’ll refrain from describing the entire thing in detail, but it discusses the rhoticity of English loan words with “r” in French—some people replace the sound with a French “r”, while others keep it. There are some elements of its methodology, like formant normalization, that I could apply to my own study. 

In other news, I finished the CITI courses this week, so now I can officially say I know how to conduct research ethically without mistreating the human subjects of such research. With that, I have gained full access to CoNYCE’s files. These include recordings of all the interviews and a giant spreadsheet of demographic information about the interviewees, which had so much data—age, gender, race, ethnicity, place of birth, education level, home language, etc. of every single person—that when I first saw it I was momentarily laughing to myself like a mad scientist thinking about what I could do with it all. While some of the interviews have transcriptions already made, the majority don’t, so my next step is actually to produce transcriptions for the rest. 

Finally, Dr. Newman has introduced me to another paper to read, Love & Walker’s “Football versus football: Effect of topic on /r/ realization in American and English sports fans”, so you can anticipate hearing about it next week.