speech delivery calculator

[DynV]

I thought Board index ‹ Feedback and Discussion Forum ‹ All Things Audio ‹ Audio Processing was the right place to post but as the warning is insistent on post on the forum board relevant to your operating system, I'm doing just that ; perhaps a moderator can move it if I was right.

I'm recording an audio version of a book and noticed my speech delivery change every 10-20 minutes depending on the text comprehension and my mood. I'm not a voice actor nor an orator so I don't have the experience which would guide me with such issues. Thus I will need to do things manually by counting the words of a medium paragraph then time my speech to calculate my flow (words per minute).

As engineers have a large experience with speech having created compression algorithms, I assume the algorithm to calculate words is mastered. If indeed words can easily be measured, calculating a certain number of consecutive words then divide it by the time it took to pronounce would not be so difficult.

Could there be a plugin which calculate speech flow, either live or after a track is complete and either manually by [pressing a button / making a selection] or automatically by [setting a time lapse between calculation and how many words to include (in the calculation)] ?

If no such feature is available to Audacity either per-packaged or in a addon/plugin, would you be so kind as to point me to a program which would do such thing to an audio file (the export: wav, ogg, ...).

Thank you kindly

I'm using Audacity 1.2.6.

[steve]

Audacity 1.2.6 is obsolete. You should upgrade to version 2.0.2 http://audacityteam.org/download/

In Audacity 2.x there is a tool in the Analyze menu called "Sound Finder". http://manual.audacityteam.org/o/man/an ... _detection
This can detect and mark sounds with numbered labels. You will need to set the "minimum silence duration" to minimum so that it can detect spaces between words. Then by setting the threshold carefully you should be able to mark individual words. It won't be 100% accurate but you may be able to get it close enough.

Once you have the words numbered, divide by the duration to get words per minute.

[DynV]

Why on earth did I choose that old version while I had

audacity-win-1.2.6.exe
audacity-win-2.0.1.exe
audacity-win-unicode-1.3.10.exe
audacity-win-unicode-1.3.13.exe

I think I assumed as the icons were different that they were a different program.

Your advice worked marvelously and here's what I got so far:

Audacity - finding words per minute using sound finder

Audacity-finding_words_per_minute_using_sound_finder.png (100.62 KiB) Viewed 960 times

Thanks again