MFCC Temporal Manipulations — User Guide

Praat script.

Author: Shai Cohen Affiliation: Department of Music, Bar-Ilan University, Israel Version: 0.1 (2025) License: MIT License Repo: https://github.com/ShaiCohen-ops/Praat-plugin_AudioTools

Contents:

What this does Quick start Parameters Outputs

What this does

Praat script.

Process Description: This script analyzes a selected Sound object using MFCCs (Mel-Frequency Cepstral Coefficients) and uses the resulting spectral information to drive time-domain resynthesis parameters (Pitch Tier and Duration Tier) via a Manipulation object. MFCCs are commonly used in speech recognition to represent the vocal tract shape. By manipulating sound based on the evolution of these coefficients over time, we can create complex, spectral-aware sound transformations.

Quick start

In Praat, select a Sound object.
Run script… → MFCC Temporal Manipulations.praat.
Set parameters and click OK.
Output object appears (see Outputs).

Parameters (form fields)

Name (GUI)	Type	Default
Number_of_coefficients	positive	12
Window_length_(s)	positive	0.015
Time_step_(s)	positive	0.005
First_filter_frequency_(Hz)	positive	100
Distance_between_filters_(Hz)	positive	100
Maximum_frequency_(Hz)	real	0
Complexity_threshold	positive	0.5
Max_stretch_factor	positive	2.0
Min_stretch_factor	positive	0.5
Freeze_duration_(s)	positive	0.2
Similarity_threshold	positive	0.3
Scramble_window_(frames)	positive	10
Keep_intermediate_objects	boolean	0

Outputs

Object name: output
Sample rate: unknown
Normalization: No automatic normalization