Compare the intensity or volume of two speakers

[zaba]

If I want to compare how loud two speakers are talking, I can easily measure the intensity in Praat. But let's say I want to measure the variation in loudness between two different words spoken by two different speakers. Is there a standard way to do this?

I can get a measurement from each vowel on the word and then compare them, but that seems kind of hard to contextualize. I can also just take the intensity measurement of an entire sentence. Looks cool.

Is there a standard way to do this?

[MalFet]

It depends on what you're trying to accomplish, I suppose. Comparing different words by different speakers isn't exactly a standard task.

[zaba]

I want to see which speaker has more variation in her loudness.

[Daniel]

Variation seems reasonable to compare because it can be measured relatively. Absolute loudness would be hard unless the recordings are equivalent in several important ways. What's the standard of comparison? But if the average of each is the base that does seen possible. However, you still need to have relatively similar ranges of recording sensitivity and amplitude with the mic.

And why would you compare words for this? It seems more relevant for longer utterances.

[MalFet]

It's going to be really hard to do this without some form of lexical standardization.

[Daniel]

I agree. And a big data set would help too.