pitchSmoothPraat: Pitch smoothing as in Praat

In soundgen: Sound Synthesis and Acoustic Analysis

Pitch smoothing as in Praat

Description

Smooths an intonation (pitch) contour with a low-pass filter, as in Praat (http://www.fon.hum.uva.nl/praat/). Algorithm: interpolates missing values (voiceless frames), performs FFT to obtain the spectrum, multiplies by a Gaussian filter, performs an inverse FFT, and fills the missing values back in. The bandwidth parameter controls the width of the low‑pass filter; larger values retain more high‑frequency detail. Similar to a special case of low-pass filtering with bandpass, but faster and can handle NAs.

Usage

pitchSmoothPraat(
  pitch,
  bandwidth,
  samplingRate,
  plot = FALSE,
  preprocess = TRUE
)

Arguments

pitch	numeric vector of pitch values (NA = voiceless)
bandwidth	the bandwidth of low-pass filter, Hz (high = less smoothing, close to zero = more smoothing)
samplingRate	the number of pitch values per second
plot	if TRUE, plots the original and smoothed pitch contours
preprocess	if TRUE, makes input non-negative and handles NA; if FALSE, expects a non-negative vector without any missing values (faster)

Value

Numeric vector of the same length as input.

See Also

analyze

Examples

pitch = c(NA, NA, 405, 441, 459, 459, 460, 462, 462, 458, 458, 445, 458, 451,
444, 444, 430, 416, 409, 403, 403, 389, 375, NA, NA, NA, NA, NA, NA, NA, NA,
NA, 183, 677, 677, 846, 883, 886, 924, 938, 883, 946, 846, 911, 826, 826,
788, NA, NA, NA, NA, NA, NA, NA, NA, NA, NA, NA, NA, NA, NA, NA, NA, NA, 307,
307, 368, 377, 383, 383, 383, 380, 377, 377, 377, 374, 374, 375, 375, 375,
375, 368, 371, 374, 375, 361, 375, 389, 375, 375, 375, 375, 375, 314, 169,
NA, NA, NA, NA, NA, NA, NA, NA, NA, NA, NA, NA, 238, 285, 361, 374, 375, 375,
375, 375, 375, 389, 403, 389, 389, 375, 375, 389, 375, 348, 361, 375, 348,
348, 361, 348, 342, 361, 361, 361, 365, 365, 361, 966, 966, 966, 959, 959,
946, 1021, 1021, 1026, 1086, 1131, 1131, 1146, 1130, 1172, 1240, 1172, 1117,
1103, 1026, 1026, 966, 919, 946, 882, 832, NA, NA, NA, NA, NA, NA, NA, NA,
NA, NA)
pitchSmoothPraat(pitch, bandwidth = 10, samplingRate = 40, plot = TRUE)
pitchSmoothPraat(pitch, bandwidth = 2, samplingRate = 40, plot = TRUE)

soundgen documentation built on Sept. 20, 2026, 5:07 p.m.