Help with measuring speech rate

[SLPSteph]

Can anyone tell me how to measure speech rate after recording a voice sample? I need to figure out syllables per minute. Thank you!

[kozikowski]

Audacity doesn't "know" what speech is. All it sees is the blue waves pretty much indistinguishable from a saxophone solo. If somebody said I needed to do this. I'd probably mark off a one minute chunk of timeline and count the syllables as the speaker progressed.

You can't do this with the SpaceBar stop, you need to use the P pause key as you go.

No "auto" key.

You could cheat and do 30 sec and extrapolate upward.

Koz

[steve]

If somebody said I needed to do this. I'd probably mark off a one minute chunk of timeline and count the syllables as the speaker progressed.

That is how I would do it, but if I was doing research and needed to test a lot of subjects, then I'd have one or more prepared scripts written down each with the same number of syllables. I'd then see how long it took for the test subjects to read the scripts. Then it is just number of syllables divided by the time taken.