How to find amplitude values on each time unit in a sound file

Question

I am new to Praat and tryingt to get the selected region in Praat script using the the amplitude values i.e. when amplitude gets larger than a threshold then I should start capturing the region and stop when it falls down.

What I know is that:

There is something called Shimmer (amplitude perturbation) which measures the difference in amplitude from cycle to cycle. Once again, this is a useful measure in speech pathology, as pathological voices will often have a higher shimmer than healthy voices (although again, both healthy and unhealthy voices will have some shimmer).

I have also read this link but couldn't get anything to measure the shimmer in praat script.
Someone please guide me in this regard.

Answer 1

The variations shimmer refers to are much smaller than what it looks like you are after.

What you seem to want is most easily achieved with the To TextGrid (silences)... command for Sound objects. You'll have to adjust the intensity thresholds, but it should do what you want.

Answer 2

I suggest reading the Voice tutorial in Praat, which you will see a link to if you check help searching for "pulses". There is a display, 'pulses', which marks "voiced pulses". There are two kinds of things with "big amplitude", voiced sounds, and noisy (voiceless) release bursts. If you were dealing with clicks, those bursts would be really loud, but they are fairly short, so you basically want quasi-period high amplitude sections, plus (good luck with that...) not 60 cycle hum. You should expect there to be a few problems if you're dealing with English and you want to identify [g], because [g] especially can be phonetically voiceless. Apart from that, a pulse listing sounds like what you want.