![]() If you have a fundamental of 100 Hz (tonic), there will be partials of 200 Hz (octave), 300 Hz (fifth above octave), 400 Hz (double octave), 500 Hz (harmonic major third above double octave), etc. there is a fundamental and a number of partials. Musical sound usually is a complex waveform, i.e. Modern pitch extraction works by making an educated guess about the perceived frequency of the fundamental. Instruments that produce chords (piano, sitar, guitar, violin if two strings are used at the same time) also will not work. Instruments in which sympathetic strings strongly resonate (piano, sitar, sarangi) won’t work well or not at all. Also, PRAAT is made for speech analysis and therefore works best with the human voice. You could even give the different voices different colours. You can reassemble the voices into a single image afterwards. Unless of course you can separate the voices, for instance by using directional mikes for each voice and analysing them separately. Multipart music, or music with a lot of (harmonic) accompaniment won’t work. For the analysis of melodic lines/pitch you have to use a basically monodic piece. What can we expect from PRAAT, or rather, what does PRAAT expect from us? PRAAT works with mono files, so if you have a stereo file you can use the CONVERT>CONVERT to mono command (see below). This is done in four parts, basic techniques for working with melody, doing pitch analysis through tonagrams, advanced techniques of working with melodic lines and working with rhythm. I will discuss mainly two aspects of using PRAAT, research on melodic lines (pitch vs time), and research on rhythm. Moreover the authors of PRAAT have written a number of articles explaining the algorhythms they have used and the models on which these are based. When it is done by a computer program we can at least know how it is done, especially since the source code is public. ![]() We do now know the cognitive processes that go on in the brain when converting souond to writing. Secondly because when a musicologist makes an analysis – for instance a transcription (yes, a transcription is an analysis), no one really knows how the transcription is made. To have a microscopic insight into melodic contours, to see the precise pitch of a given note, to have precise measurements of the duration of beats – they are all impossible without such a program. First because it enables us to do certain types of analysis that cannot be done by the ear and the brain. PRAAT is made for linguistics, but it works well for certain types of music analysis. At present I consider PRAAT the best program, although there are others. Bel’s MMA in Bombay and my own PitchXtractor for the original Macintosh are examples. From the 80s onward computers have been increasingly used for music analysis. A major breakthrough was Seeger’s melograph in the 1950’s. Percy Grainger had pointed out the need for advanced technological tools for analysing music in the early 20 th century. PART 3: Advanced work on melodic contours. ![]()
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