Locating Burst Onsets Using SFF Envelope and Phase Information

Bursts are produced by closing the oral tract at a place of articulation and suddenly releasing the acoustic energy built-up behind the closure in the tract. The release of energy is an impulselike behavior, and it is followed by a short duration of frication. The burst release is short and mostly weak in nature (compared to sonorant sounds), thus making it difficult to detect its presence in continuous speech. This paper attempts to identify burst onsets based on parameters derived from single frequency filtering (SFF) analysis of speech signals. The SFF envelope and phase information give good spectral and temporal resolutions of certain features of the signal. Signal reconstructed from the SFF phase information is shown to be useful in locating burst onsets. Entropy and spectral distance parameters from the SFF spectral envelopes are used to refine the burst onset candidate set. The identified burst onset locations are compared with manual annotations in the TIMIT database.