Identifying Frication and Aspiration Noise in the Frequency Domain: The Case of Korean AIveolar Lax Fricatives

This paper introduces the technique of semi-automatically identifying different types of noise in the frequency domain. Given the lower cutoff frequency of the frication noise, and a user-specified constant, the technique identifies the boundary between the frication and aspiration noise in a Korean lax fricative followed by the vowel /a/ by comparing the upper and lower sums of energy with respect to the cutoff frequency. The user-specified constant can be adjusted for different speakers. When the technique was applied to distinguish the two types of noise of Korean lax fricatives from the same speaker, the average and standard deviation of the difference between the manually inserted boundaries and the automatically inserted boundaries were 2.67ms and 1.80ms respectively.