Parselmouth for bioacoustics: automated acoustic analysis in Python

ABSTRACT

Bioacoustics increasingly relies on large datasets and computational methods. The need to batch-process large amounts of data and the increased focus on algorithmic processing require software tools. To optimally assist in a bioacoustician’s workflow, software tools need to be as simple and effective as possible. Five years ago, the Python package Parselmouth was released to provide easy and intuitive access to all functionality in the Praat software. Whereas Praat is principally designed for phonetics and speech processing, plenty of bioacoustics studies have used its advanced acoustic algorithms. Here, we evaluate existing usage of Parselmouth and discuss in detail several studies which used the software library. We argue that Parselmouth has the potential to be used even more in bioacoustics research, and suggest future directions to be pursued with the help of Parselmouth.

KEYWORDS:

• Acoustic analysis
• data processing
• software
• Praat
• Python

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Supplementary material

Supplemental data for this article can be accessed online at https://doi.org/10.1080/09524622.2023.2259327

Correction Statement

This article has been corrected with minor changes. These changes do not impact the academic content of the article.

Notes

1. Available from https://github.com/YannickJadoul/Parselmouth, documentation at https://parselmouth.readthedocs.io/

2. https://www.python.org/doc/essays/omg-darpa-mcc-position/

3. https://numpy.org/doc/stable/user/c-info.python-as-glue.html

4. The corresponding Praat version can be accessed as parselmouth.PRAAT_VERSION.

5. https://www.fon.hum.uva.nl/praat/manual/Sound__To_Pitch__ac____.html

6. https://numpy.org/

7. https://pandas.pydata.org/

8. https://joblib.readthedocs.io/

9. https://scipy.org/

10. https://www.mturk.com/

11. https://www.heroku.com/

12. https://psynetdev.gitlab.io/PsyNet/

13. https://dallinger.readthedocs.io/

14. https://www.fon.hum.uva.nl/praat/manual/Manipulation.html

15. https://numpy.org/

16. https://scipy.org/

17. https://rpy2.github.io/

18. https://rstudio.github.io/reticulate/

19. In scientific publications, we advise to report the exact version of both Praat and Parselmouth used to obtain the results.

Additional information

Funding

The Comparative Bioacoustics Group is funded by Max Planck Group Leader funding to A.R. The Center for Music in the Brain is funded by the Danish National Research Foundation [DNRF117].