EGG: tools for electroglottographic analysis

This repository hosts scripts for analysis of the electroglottographic signal, and data samples.

1) a gallery of signals exemplifying different types of glottalization (work in progress)

See this folder. This strand of work is linked to the project of devising new scripts for the detection and characterization of various phonetic subtypes of glottalization.

2) peakdet_inter: a tool for semi-automatic analysis of electroglottographic signals

peakdet is a script for analyzing electroglottographic signals based on the detection of positive and negative peaks on the derivative of the EGG signal.

An earlier version of peakdet is hosted

• in the COVAREP repository as a function, without a user interface for data verification
• on a website called 'Voiceresearch' as a full-fledged script with visual verification of the results token by token.

The version available in the present repository has an interface for visual verification of the results token by token. This script is now called peakdet_inter to distinguish it from the core function, peakdet. The version proposed here has:

• an improved front-end (but you can still choose to view the results with the same colour theme as in version 1.0 if you prefer)
• an improved back-end: improvements to the main analysis algorithms.

Praat users are advised to try out James Kirby's praatdet or Cédric Gendrot's oq1praat.

3) a script for visualizing average curves for sets of tokens: aver

See this folder.

About the language

Currently the scripts are in Matlab. They work on Matlab 5 and later versions. The current version of peakdet_inter uses the function audioread to open WAV files (electroglottographic signals are handled like audio signals); this function was introduced in R2012b. If you use an earlier version of Matlab, simply revert to the older function: wavread.

For a complete overhaul in future, adopting Julia would seem the way to go, for three main reasons:

• Julia is open source, and "when students are trained on open source software, they learn skills that are not hostage to a particular company or product, and can stay with them through their professional careers" (Viral Shah, from an interview with Analytics India Magazine).
• Among open source languages, Julia is legible, and thus much better than Perl (typical 'write-only' language) or Python. It is also 'cleaner' than R.
• Julia handles Unicode (which is absolutely essential for linguists, phoneticians...) whereas Matlab does not. If you would be interested in adopting Julia, please let us know (for instance by opening an Issue) and we will consider re-programming peakdet_inter in this language.