Documentation of Expected Outputs

[mjfox3]

I am trying to use features of the parselmouth module and I'm finding that some methods lack enough documentation to know what their output is. Usually I can work backwards from the output of the same function in Praat itself, but in the case of the MFCC(CC).extract_features() method I do not see an equivalent function in Praat. Moreover, the output from this method does not match the output from to_matrix() or other methods for getting values from the object. Using parselmouth in general would be made a lot easier by updating the documentation with expected outputs and what they are.

[YannickJadoul]

@mjfox3 Agreed. There's still a bunch of stuff I want to do in Parselmouth, and better docs is one of them. I've started work on this in the version of the docs of the next release, e.g. documenting parselmouth.praat.call, but there's a lot of work to do. So any help is welcome :-)

You are correct that most functions map directly onto Praat (which is one of the reasons documentation has not been at the top of my todo-list). parselmouth.MFCC.extract_features (and parselmouth.MFCC.to_matrix_features, I'm not sure why I made the first alias, anymore) corresponds to the (by default hidden) Praat action To Matrix (features). This seems badly documented in Praat, as well, but in the Praat C/C++ code, there's a comment:

/* 1: cepstral difference function (d)
 * 2: spectral stability (dstab)
 * 3: spectral center of gravity (gs)
 * 4: stable internal duration
 */