ELANPRAAT

ELANPRAAT is a term used to describe an integrated workflow that connects ELAN, a multimedia annotation tool, with Praat, a widely used acoustic analysis program. The aim is to enable researchers to annotate time-aligned audio or video data in ELAN while simultaneously performing acoustic analyses in Praat, preserving synchronization across the two environments.

Because there is no single official product by that name, ELANPRAAT refers to a collection of community-developed scripts, converters, and best practices designed to facilitate data exchange between ELAN's EAF format and Praat's TextGrid format. Typical workflows involve annotating segments in ELAN, exporting to a Praat-friendly representation, running analyses such as formant tracking, pitch, and intensity in Praat, and then importing the results back into ELAN as additional tiers or metadata.

Advantages include streamlined workflows, reproducible pipelines, and clearer linkage between perceptual annotations and acoustic measurements. Limitations can include extra steps for format conversion, potential drift between annotation timecodes and automated analyses, and varying compatibility across software versions. The practical implementation often requires some scripting or manual adjustment to map ELAN tiers to Praat analyses and to batch process multiple files.

ELANPRAAT is used in areas such as endangered language documentation, phonetic fieldwork, and laboratory phonology, where tied annotation and acoustic data enhances analysis and publication quality. As a concept, it reflects a broader trend toward integrated annotation-analysis pipelines in linguistic research.

See also: ELAN; Praat; TextGrid; EAF; time-aligned data; phonetics software.