Vowel and Pitch Contour Detection

ELAN recognizers
1

I am trying to get a graphical representation of pitch contours via the Avatech “Tag Vowel” recognizer. I assume this is the appropriate recognizer as Lenkiewicz, Gegre Schreer, et. al state pitch contour detection and tracking is possible and this seems the closest recognizer possible. I can import a PRAAT pitchtiers into ELAN without the recognizer and can also use ANVIL for similar purposes, but from what I have seen and heard (and hope), the Avatech recognizers will provide me greater pitch contour details and accuracy, similar to the PRAAT script extension Prosogram. The other recognizers are working quite nicely. I assume posting a report of the error from ELAN would be most helpful? From what I can decipher of the report, something is not going right when my information reaches the CLAM server. Either I didn’t package the information correctly when I send it, e.g. part of the error says “The PUT method is not allowed for the requested URL”; or I am not doing something right at the website, that I am not setting something up correctly at the CLAM workstation.

Any suggestions resolving this would be appreciated.

REPORT from ELAN:

DEBUG: Using CLAM Server REST webservice URL http://catalog.clarin.eu/avatech/avatech_mpi_tag_Vowels/
DEBUG: max_f0=336.60907
DEBUG: epsilon=2.0
DEBUG: silence_threshold=0.03
DEBUG: voicing_threshold=0.45
DEBUG: loglevel=normal
DEBUG: source=C:\Users\Lop\Documents\AV Data\CHA\CAforSLA\Jodi_Arias_Trial_Day_17\jodi_arias_trial_day_17.wav
DEBUG: output_f0_db=C:\Programs\ELAN\DATAOUTPUT\JodyPittch.csv
DEBUG: vowel_f0_db=C:\Programs\ELAN\DATAOUTPUT\Jodyvowel.csv
DEBUG: vowel_stats=C:\Programs\ELAN\DATAOUTPUT\Jodyminmax.csv
DEBUG: vowel_f0_db_xml=C:\Programs\ELAN\DATAOUTPUT\jodyTierAverage.xml
DEBUG: vowel_stats_xml=C:\Programs\ELAN\DATAOUTPUT\JodyTierMinMax.xml
DEBUG: Reading AVATecH recognizer CMDI metadata file: recognizer.cmdi
INFO: Recognizer: TagVowels
WARN: Got error response HTTP 405
WARN: Response: <?xml version=“1.0” encoding=“ISO-8859-1”?> <!DOCTYPE html PUBLIC “-//W3C//DTD XHTML 1.0 Strict//EN” “http://www.w3.org/TR/xhtml1/DTD/xhtml1-strict.dtd”> <html xmlns=“http://www.w3.org/1999/xhtml” lang=“en” xml:lang=“en”> <head> <title>Method not allowed!</title> <link rev=“made” href=“mailto:tobias.vanvalkenhoef@mpi.nl” /> <style type=“text/css”><!–/–><![CDATA[/><!–/ body { color: #000000; background-color: #FFFFFF; } a:link { color: #0000CC; } p, address {margin-left: 3em;} span {font-size: smaller;} /]]>*/–></style> </head> <body> <h1>Method not allowed!</h1> <p> The PUT method is not allowed for the requested URL. </p> <p> If you think this is a server error, please contact the webmaster. </p> <h2>Error 405</h2> <address> lux112.mpi.nl<br /> <span>Thu Jul 10 18:31:29 2014<br /> Apache/2.2.12 (Linux/SUSE)</span> </address> </body> </html>
DEBUG: PUT response code: 405
ERROR: Could not create CLAM workspace at http://catalog.clarin.eu/avatech/avatech_mpi_tag_Vowels/
RESULT: FAILED.

2

Hi Randall, the error message that you got was unfortunately a bit misleading (“HTTP PUT not allowed”). In fact, CLAM on our server had a problem calling the recognizer and in turn calling Praat. We have now re-installed Praat and the system libraries on which it depends and things seem to be working again. Please test!

Note that ELAN 4.7.2 already ships with pre-installed configuration and tools to invoke the recognizers on our servers, so you will probably need fewer steps than documented in the original manual. However, if you want to process many files, it can be interesting to install the recognizer on your local PC: Both Praat and this recognizer are free open source software available for Windows, Linux and Mac.

Note that the Tag Vowel recognizer is a demo by us, not one of the advanced recognizers by our Fraunhofer partners. It demonstrates how you can use the Avatech (Auvis) interface to make it easy to call Praat from ELAN, post-process results and generate annotation tiers and optionally timeseries curves as output.

The Fraunhofer recognizers on the other hand are not open source, but you can freely invoke them on our server, which is the default configuration of new ELAN versions. You may also request a license for academic use if you really need to use the Fraunhofer recognizers on your own computer, e.g. to improve speed or to work without internet connection to our server.

3

Hello Eric,
Unfortunately there is still a problem. The error is different though and will be explained shortly.
But first, as regards my previous ELAN version. It was ELANcorpA version 4.6.1 and I downloaded it on the 6th of this month.

Here are the steps of what I did. First I uninstalled the old ELAN, then did a registry clean via CCleaner, and then installed ELAN 4.7.2 . (Actually this isn’t quite right and I don’t know if the technicalities are important: basically I actually re-installed ELAN 4.7.2 a few times to see if some minor changes would get the recognizer working. The first re-install was when I uninstalled ELAN 4.6.1 and the extensions–which contain the recognizer–didn’t uninstall with it and I installed ELAN 4.7.2 over the extension folder. The third re-install was after I did a complete registry clean with CCleaner. The third install gave a slightly different error message than the 2nd).

ELAN 4.7.2 did in fact come with the pre-installed recognizers as you mentioned and I did not have to download the zip folder and place the recognizers in the extensions folder as I did with the previous version.

I have tried a number of different files and formats and the following results consistently occur

First, ELAN states there “is and error inside the recognizer”

Second. ELAN asks “Load tiers and timeseries files created by the recognizer?” and gives me the option to check/uncheck a Tiers box. (Note, before I did the 3rd re-install, i.e. before I did a registry clean with CCleaner, this part gave me another option…I don’t remember though and would need to return home to get the note I jotted it down on).

Third, I then click ‘yes’ and nothing happens, no tiers come up as they did with the IAIS recognizers

Differences in steps 1-3 between the two ELAN versions. The second step never happened in ELAN 4.6.1. Instead it would just say something like ‘tiers unable to be created’

Here is the error report from ELAN. It has been very similar throughout all my tests…basically it looks like the CLAM server is still in need of some work, maybe?

ERROR REPORT
DEBUG: Using CLAM Server REST webservice URL http://catalog.clarin.eu/avatech/avatech_mpi_tag_Vowels/
DEBUG: source=C:\Users\Lop\Documents\AV Data\CHA\CAforSLA\DriveTimeChristmasBanter\drive_time_2_09-clanw.wav
DEBUG: max_f0=550.0
DEBUG: epsilon=2.0
DEBUG: silence_threshold=0.03
DEBUG: voicing_threshold=0.45
DEBUG: loglevel=verbose
DEBUG: output_f0_db=DTpitchtest1
DEBUG: vowel_f0_db=DTpitchtest
DEBUG: vowel_stats=DTpitchtest2
DEBUG: vowel_f0_db_xml=DTpitchtest3
DEBUG: vowel_stats_xml=DTpitchtest4
DEBUG: Reading AVATecH recognizer CMDI metadata file: recognizer.cmdi
INFO: Recognizer: TagVowels
WARN: Unexpected CMDI content, tag: documentation
WARN: Got error response HTTP 405 for: …8e81a4041ef3cb6a
WARN: Response: <?xml version=“1.0” encoding=“ISO-8859-1”?> <!DOCTYPE html PUBLIC “-//W3C//DTD XHTML 1.0 Strict//EN” “http://www.w3.org/TR/xhtml1/DTD/xhtml1-strict.dtd”> <html xmlns=“http://www.w3.org/1999/xhtml” lang=“en” xml:lang=“en”> <head> <title>Method not allowed!</title> <link rev=“made” href=“mailto:latadmin@mpi.nl” /> <style type=“text/css”><!–/–><![CDATA[/><!–/ body { color: #000000; background-color: #FFFFFF; } a:link { color: #0000CC; } p, address {margin-left: 3em;} span {font-size: smaller;} /]]>*/–></style> </head> <body> <h1>Method not allowed!</h1> <p> The PUT method is not allowed for the requested URL. </p> <p> If you think this is a server error, please contact the webmaster. </p> <h2>Error 405</h2> <address> lux112.mpi.nl<br /> <span>Mon Jul 14 20:12:32 2014<br /> Apache/2.2.12 (Linux/SUSE)</span> </address> </body> </html>
DEBUG: PUT response code: 405 URL: http://catalog.clarin.eu/avatech/avatech_mpi_tag_Vowels/8e81a4041ef3cb6a
ERROR: Could not create CLAM workspace at http://catalog.clarin.eu/avatech/avatech_mpi_tag_Vowels/

RESULT: FAILED.

4

Looking at your error message again, there simply is a typo in the URL " http://catalog.clarin.eu/avatech/avatech_mpi_tag_Vowels/" - the last V has to be lower case. You can edit this in the file recognizer.cmdi in the clam-mpi-tag-vowels subdirectory of the extensions directory of your ELAN installation: The “runLinux” and “runMac” lines have the correct URL, but the “runWin” line has the typo. Sorry about the typo in the configuration that ships with ELAN 4.7.2!

5

That did it! It now works splendidly.

Just in case there are any future folks who aren’t so good at computers, I will spell out exactly how replaced the recognizer.cmdi file. All I did was open the recognizer.cmdi file from the location Eric mentioned. I opened it using Notepad. I then pressed control+F to find the capitalized “Vowel” word. I then re-wrote it in lower case as “vowel”. Then, when I went to save it, instead of saving it as a .txt file, I went to the drop down box in SAVE AS TYPE and marked “all files” and pressed okay, effectively replacing the old recognizer.cmdi file with the new one in the same location.

That’s got to hurt…this one small typo that just shipped with the new version…but hey it works great and, as far as I can tell, this is the best running timeseries pitch recognizer out there. So thanks and keep up the good work.