I was asked whether the vOICe could be used to sonify spectrograms in PRAAT. it can. See the steps below.

1. Launch PRAAT.

2. Reduce screen clutter if possible. Disable any unnecessary toolbars and close any unnecessary windows.

3. Load your sound file and using your screen reader’s mouse cursor, click on the “edit button”.

4. You now have a spectrogram displayed.

5. Launch the vOICe.

6. Navigate to the “options” menu.

7. Navigate to the “sonify gui” submenu and expand it.

8. Choose the option to sonify the area under the mouse pointer. This option sounds the view under the mouse pointer. The reason I have chosen this option is because the spectrum, according to the help appears as a grey line in the bottom half of the PRAAT window. You also may want to hit f5 for inverse video so that the grey spectrum stands out.

9. Hit windows+m to minimize all windows. By now, you should be hearing changes in sound as you navigate.

10. Navigate to the PRAAT window.

11. Assuming you are using a screen reader, switch to its mouse cursor.

12. Navigate towards the bottom of the screen. You will hear sound changes as you navigate through the various buttons. In my limited testing, the spectrom was a horizontal line that varied in pitch depending upon its frequency. The height of the line represents the frequency while the length of the line represents the length of the spectrum.

13. There seem to be a lot of options that dump the data about the current object to a text file so you may want to use them to get precise numbers etc.

14. You can slow down the soundscape to facilitate better interpretation.

15. Try loading different sound files with varing frequencies and look for the pitch changes in these files. This will help you in becoming oriented to the spectrom and how it sounds.