SNACK Sound Toolkit

http://www.speech.kth.se/snack/

This is another whopper like PRAAT.  This one was developed at the Royal Institute of Technology (KTH) in Stockholm.

So SIT then.

It's cool and cheap and does the job.  This is like the IKEA of speech tools.  Maybe too high-level though. Let's see:

The Snack Sound Toolkit is designed to be used with a scripting language such as Tcl/Tk or Python. Using Snack you can create powerful multi-platform audio applications with just a few lines of code. Snack has commands for basic sound handling, such as playback, recording, file and socket I/O. Snack also provides primitives for sound visualization, e.g. waveforms and spectrograms. It was developed mainly to handle digital recordings of speech, but is just as useful for general audio. Snack has also successfully been applied to other one-dimensional signals.
The combination of Snack and a scripting language makes it possible to create sound tools and applications with a minimum of effort. This is due to the rapid development nature of scripting languages. As a bonus you get an application that is cross-platform from start. It is also easy to integrate Snack based applications with existing sound analysis software.

Yep.  Bit beyond me.  But this is the new goal: technology-literate teachers who also work outside of universities.

Praat: an open source voice analysis tool

This is a great tool. Miraculously free.

It gives you info like this stuff here.

There's pitch analysis as well as waveforms which can be great to show your students to highlight syllable stress, rhythm and pitch.

So instead of drawing your impression on the board you can show them their voice in these visual forms. If you then do your YOURS, the differences become obvious and measurable quite a bit faster.

The download is free and is worth it if only to support the co-developer Paul Boersma in getting some press and eventually some hair gel.

Download as soon as you can. And bring that computer to class.

http://www.fon.hum.uva.nl/praat/