Patent ID: 8069039

Claim:
A sound signal processing apparatus comprising: a frame information generation section that generates frame information of each frame of a sound signal; a storage section that stores the frame information generated by the frame information generation section; a first interval determination section that determines a first utterance interval in the sound signal; and a second interval determination section that determines a second utterance interval based on the frame information of the first utterance interval stored in the storage section such that the second utterance interval is shorter than the first utterance interval and confined within the first utterance interval, wherein the frame information contains a signal index value representative of a signal level of each frame of the sound signal, and wherein the second interval determination section determines the second utterance interval by removing one or more frames from the first utterance interval according to the signal index values of the frames contained in the first utterance interval, such that the removed frames are continuous from either of a start point or an end point of the first utterance interval and that each of the removed frames has the signal index value lower than a threshold value which is determined according to a maximum signal index value of a frame contained in the first utterance interval.