Aggregate data
Fast Track collects a lot of information about formant patterns across time. It may be too much for some purposes. After a folder analysis is carried out, this function will aggregate formant information from all files into a single CSV files. Calculating average values from the many small measurements makes it way more likely that these will be reliable, and allows for many different presentations of the same data without having to re-measure anything.
Below are four different presentations of the same data:
- top-left: every single measurement, collected every 2 ms (n = >200,000).
- top-right: every category mean, for each talker (n = 1668).
- bottom-left: every category mean, overall.
- bottom-right: average formant values every 10% of duration, averaged across talkers.
The user determines the number of formants to collect and the number of equally-sized temporal bins. For example, the default of five bins returns median (or average) formant values collected for the first 20% of the vowel, then from 20-40%, from 40-60%, and so on, for each formant. Vowel durations and average f0 is also collected. More information could easily also be collected by modifying the script directly (/tools/aggregate.praat).
A CSV file is created as below. Each row represents a single sound file. Formant measurements vary across columns. These are named "FXY", where X represents the formant number and Y represents the temporal bin. So, F12 represents the second measurement for F1 and F21 represents the first measurement for F2.
