Pitch Settings
Configuring the pitch contour.
Adapted from http://www.fon.hum.uva.nl/praat/manual/Sound__To_Pitch__ac____.html and http://www.fon.hum.uva.nl/praat/manual/Sound__To_Pitch__cc____.html
The Pitch settings window can be opened by choosing Pitch settings... from the Praat menu in the Speech Analysis view of the Session Editor window. The behaviour of the Time step and Pitch floor parameters differ depending on the choice of Auto-correlation or Cross-correlation.
Sound to Pitch (Auto-correlate)
- Time step (s) (standard value: 0.0)
- the measurement interval (frame duration), in seconds. If you supply 0, Praat will use a time step of 0.75 / (pitch floor), e.g. 0.01 seconds if the pitch floor is 75 Hz; in this example, Praat computes 100 pitch values per second.
- Pitch floor (Hz) (standard value: 75 Hz)
- candidates below this frequency will not be recruited. This parameter determines the effective length of the analysis window: it will be 3 longest periods long, i.e., if the pitch floor is 75 Hz, the window will be effectively 3/75 = 0.04 seconds long.
Sound to Pich (Cross-correlate)
- Time step (s) (standard value: 0.0)
- the measurement interval (frame duration), in seconds. If you supply 0, Praat will use a time step of 0.25 / (pitch floor), e.g. 0.00333333 seconds if the pitch floor is 75 Hz; in this example, Praat computes 300 pitch values per second.
- Pitch floor (Hz) (standard value: 75 Hz)
- candidates below this frequency will not be recruited. This parameter determines the length of the analysis window: it will be 1 longest period long, i.e., if the pitch floor is 75 Hz, the window will be 1/75 = 0.01333333 seconds long.
Note: Note that if you set the time step to zero, the analysis windows for consecutive
measurements will overlap appreciably: Praat will always compute 4 pitch values within one window
length, i.e., the degree of oversampling is 4.
- Very accurate (standard value: off)
- if off, the window is a Hanning window with a physical length of 3 / (pitch floor). If on, the window is a Gaussian window with a physical length of 6 / (pitch floor), i.e. twice the effective length.
A post-processing algorithm seeks the cheapest path through the candidates. The settings that determine the cheapest path are:
- Pitch ceiling (Hz) (standard value: 600 Hz)
- candidates above this frequency will be ignored.
- Silence threshold (standard value: 0.03)
- frames that do not contain amplitudes above this threshold (relative to the global maximum amplitude), are probably silent.
- Voicing threshold (standard value: 0.45)
- the strength of the unvoiced candidate, relative to the maximum possible autocorrelation. To increase the number of unvoiced decisions, increase this value.
- Octave cost (standard value: 0.01 per octave)
- degree of favouring of high-frequency candidates, relative to the maximum possible autocorrelation. This is necessary because even (or: especially) in the case of a perfectly periodic signal, all undertones of F0 are equally strong candidates as F0 itself. To more strongly favour recruitment of high-frequency candidates, increase this value.
- Octave-jump cost (standard value: 0.35)
- degree of disfavouring of pitch changes, relative to the maximum possible autocorrelation. To decrease the number of large frequency jumps, increase this value. In contrast with what is described in the article, this value will be corrected for the time step: multiply by 0.01 s / TimeStep to get the value in the way it is used in the formulas in the article.
- Voiced / unvoiced cost (standard value: 0.14)
- degree of disfavouring of voiced/unvoiced transitions, relative to the maximum possible autocorrelation. To decrease the number of voiced/unvoiced transitions, increase this value. In contrast with what is described in the article, this value will be corrected for the time step: multiply by 0.01 s / TimeStep to get the value in the way it is used in the formulas in the article.
Display settings:
- Dot size
- Size of pitch dots in display.