TalkBank Linking

Once you have digitized your audio, you are ready to link your audio to a transcript. To learn how to do this, you should first download and unzip the audio.zip set of sample files. That file contains:

  • Boys85.aiff -- an 16-bit AIFF sound file.
  • Boys85unf.cha -- a text file showing how CHAT looks when sound regions are not marked
  • Boys85.cha -- a text file that can be used to play sounds from Boys85.aiff when loaded into the CLAN editor.

 

To link a transcript to an audio file:

  1. Open the transcript (boys85.cha) in the CLAN editor.
  2. In the Mode menu, select Transcribe Sound or Movie or press the F5 key.
  3. Locate the audio file that you wish to link to. The movie should start running in a QuickTime screen. The first portion of your text will be highlighted also
  4. As the audio file plays, you can set bullets (links to a portion of footage) for the highlighted text by hitting the space bar after the desired speech. This will set a bullet link for that section and advance to the next portion of the transcript.
  5. Continue this process until you have linked the desired section of your transcript. If you click in the transcript you will no longer be in "Transcribe" mode. To continue transcribing simply select the "Transcribe Sound or Movie" option again or press the F5 key again.

 

To use Sonic Mode:

  1. To enter SONIC mode, type ESC-0 (the number zero, this is a toggle).
  2. Next, find a sentence you want to here and triple click on the bullet that ends that segment.
  3. The wave form at the bottom of the window will now move to that part of the file.
  4. If you now press the command (or control) button and the mouse, you will play that sentence.
  5. Alternatively, you can then go down to the wave form line and use command-mouseclick there.
  6. Next, you can play around with and shift-mouseclick to move the utterance's sound boundaries around. In order to enter new sound boundary values for a given bullet, you click the S button at the bottom left. The arrows move the sound left and right. The plus and minus buttons expand or contract the length of the included sound wave.

Alternatively, you can type ESC-8 when the waveform is not displayed and CLAN will play one sentence after another. You can stop by a single click and you can exit with a double click. Happy SONIC CHAT!