How to create elegant waveform/spectrogram images in R

In this post I show how to generate waveform/spectrogram graphics in R.

phonetics
praat
dataviz
Author
Affiliation

Joseph V. Casillas

Rutgers University

Published

April 18, 2024

The problem

Generating elegant dataviz for spectrogram/waveforms can be cumbersome. Praat has excellent plotting capabilities, but can be rather difficult to teach, especially if you want to plot the waveform/spectrogram/textgrid combination. I posted on the topic a long time ago for a solution in R, and this post is an update of sorts, particularly for those not interested in working in Praat directly.

The solution

Rasmus Puggaard-Rode’s fantastic package praatpicture makes the process trivial. Assume we have a wav file called welcome.wav and the corresponding textgrid welcome.TextGrid. We can plot the wavform/spectrogram/textgrid combination with a simple call to praatpicture():

praatpicture(sound = "welcome.wav")
Figure 1

I won’t go through all of the capabilities of the package (the documentation is great), but here are a few of my common use cases.

praatpicture(
  sound = "welcome.wav", 
  spec_freqRange = c(0, 4900),
  frames = c('sound', 'spectrogram', 'TextGrid'), 
  formant_plotOnSpec = TRUE, 
  formant_color = '#cc0033'
)
Figure 2 
praatpicture(
  sound = "welcome.wav", 
  spec_freqRange = c(0, 4900),
  frames = c('spectrogram'), 
  spec_color = c(
    'darkblue', 'blue', 'cyan', 'yellow', 'orange', 'brown', '#cc0033')
  )
Figure 3 
praatpicture(
  sound = "welcome.wav", 
  spec_freqRange = c(0, 4900),
  frames = 'spectrogram', 
  spec_color = c("white", scales::pal_brewer(palette = "Reds")(9))
  )
Figure 4 
praatpicture(
  sound = "welcome.wav", 
  spec_freqRange = c(0, 4900),
  frames = 'spectrogram', 
  spec_color = c(viridis::viridis_pal(option = "B")(8), "#cc0033")
  )
Figure 5

Reproducibility information

This document was written in quarto.

Session info

 setting  value
 version  R version 4.3.1 (2023-06-16)
 os       macOS Sonoma 14.1
 system   aarch64, darwin20
 ui       X11
 language (EN)
 collate  en_US.UTF-8
 ctype    en_US.UTF-8
 tz       America/New_York
 date     2024-04-18
 pandoc   3.1.1 @ /Applications/RStudio.app/Contents/Resources/app/quarto/bin/tools/ (via rmarkdown)
             loadedversion       date
bit                  4.0.5 2022-11-15
bit64                4.0.5 2020-08-30
cachem               1.0.8 2023-05-01
cli                  3.6.2 2023-12-11
colorspace           2.1-0 2023-01-23
crayon               1.5.2 2022-09-29
devtools             2.4.5 2022-10-11
digest              0.6.35 2024-03-11
dplyr                1.1.4 2023-11-17
ellipsis             0.3.2 2021-04-29
evaluate              0.23 2023-11-01
fansi                1.0.6 2023-12-08
fastmap              1.1.1 2023-02-24
fs                   1.6.3 2023-07-20
generics             0.1.3 2022-07-05
ggplot2              3.5.0 2024-02-23
glue                 1.7.0 2024-01-09
gridExtra              2.3 2017-09-09
gtable               0.3.4 2023-08-21
here                 1.0.1 2020-12-13
hms                  1.1.3 2023-03-21
htmltools            0.5.7 2023-11-03
htmlwidgets          1.6.4 2023-12-06
httpuv              1.6.14 2024-01-26
jsonlite             1.8.8 2023-12-04
knitr                 1.45 2023-10-30
later                1.3.2 2023-12-06
lifecycle            1.0.4 2023-11-07
magrittr             2.0.3 2022-03-30
MASS            7.3-60.0.1 2024-01-13
memoise              2.0.1 2021-11-26
mime                  0.12 2021-09-28
miniUI             0.1.1.1 2018-05-18
munsell              0.5.0 2018-06-12
phonTools          0.2-2.2 2023-11-20
pillar               1.9.0 2023-03-22
pkgbuild             1.4.3 2023-12-10
pkgconfig            2.0.3 2019-09-22
pkgload              1.3.4 2024-01-16
praatpicture         1.0.0 2024-03-07
profvis              0.3.8 2023-05-02
promises             1.2.1 2023-08-10
purrr                1.0.2 2023-08-10
R6                   2.5.1 2021-08-19
RColorBrewer         1.1-3 2022-04-03
Rcpp                1.0.12 2024-01-09
readr                2.1.5 2024-01-10
remotes            2.4.2.1 2023-07-18
rlang                1.1.3 2024-01-10
rmarkdown             2.26 2024-03-05
rPraat             1.3.2-1 2021-02-27
rprojroot            2.0.4 2023-11-05
rstudioapi          0.16.0 2024-03-24
scales               1.3.0 2023-11-28
sessioninfo          1.2.2 2021-12-06
shiny                1.8.0 2023-11-17
signal               1.8-0 2023-11-27
stringi              1.8.3 2023-12-11
stringr              1.5.1 2023-11-14
tibble               3.2.1 2023-03-20
tidyselect           1.2.1 2024-03-11
tuneR                1.4.6 2023-11-27
tzdb                 0.4.0 2023-05-12
urlchecker           1.0.1 2021-11-30
usethis              2.2.3 2024-02-19
utf8                 1.2.4 2023-10-22
vctrs                0.6.5 2023-12-01
viridis              0.6.5 2024-01-29
viridisLite          0.4.2 2023-05-02
vroom                1.6.5 2023-12-05
wrassp               1.0.5 2024-01-09
xfun                  0.42 2024-02-08
xtable               1.8-4 2019-04-21
yaml                 2.3.8 2023-12-11