arXiv research

Singing voice conversion is a task to convert a song sang by a source singer to the voice of a target singer. In this paper, we propose using a parallel data free, many-to-one voice conversion technique on singing voices. A phonetic posterior feature is first generated by decoding singing voices through a robust Automa…

A fast voice conversion method using diffusion models.

We present a voice conversion solution using recurrent sequence to sequence modeling for DNNs. Our solution takes advantage of recent advances in attention based modeling in the fields of Neural Machine Translation (NMT), Text-to-Speech (TTS) and Automatic Speech Recognition (ASR). The problem consists of converting be…

Improved autoencoder for F0-consistent voice conversion.

Proposes a new voice conversion model that preserves pitch patterns.

In this work we introduce a semi-supervised approach to the voice conversion problem, in which speech from a source speaker is converted into speech of a target speaker. The proposed method makes use of both parallel and non-parallel utterances from the source and target simultaneously during training. This approach ca…

Non-parallel many-to-many voice conversion, as well as zero-shot voice conversion, remain under-explored areas. Deep style transfer algorithms, such as generative adversarial networks (GAN) and conditional variational autoencoder (CVAE), are being applied as new solutions in this field. However, GAN training is sophist…

Many-to-Many VTN improves voice conversion across multiple speakers.

FasterVoiceGrad speeds up VC by 6-7x with novel distillation.

Mel-frequency filter bank (MFB) based approaches have the advantage of learning speech compared to raw spectrum since MFB has less feature size. However, speech generator with MFB approaches require additional vocoder that needs a huge amount of computation expense for training process. The additional pre/post processi…

MaskCycleGAN-VC improves voice conversion without parallel data.

We present a deep learning method for singing voice conversion. The proposed network is not conditioned on the text or on the notes, and it directly converts the audio of one singer to the voice of another. Training is performed without any form of supervision: no lyrics or any kind of phonetic features, no notes, and …

A-StarGAN improves nonparallel voice conversion speed and realism.

Recently, voice conversion (VC) without parallel data has been successfully adapted to multi-target scenario in which a single model is trained to convert the input voice to many different speakers. However, such model suffers from the limitation that it can only convert the voice to the speakers in the training data, …

We present a fully convolutional wav-to-wav network for converting between speakers' voices, without relying on text. Our network is based on an encoder-decoder architecture, where the encoder is pre-trained for the task of Automatic Speech Recognition, and a multi-speaker waveform decoder is trained to reconstruct the…

We present the Voice Conversion Challenge 2018, designed as a follow up to the 2016 edition with the aim of providing a common framework for evaluating and comparing different state-of-the-art voice conversion (VC) systems. The objective of the challenge was to perform speaker conversion (i.e. transform the vocal ident…

End-to-end models for raw audio generation are a challenge, specially if they have to work with non-parallel data, which is a desirable setup in many situations. Voice conversion, in which a model has to impersonate a speaker in a recording, is one of those situations. In this paper, we propose Blow, a single-scale nor…

This paper proposes a voice conversion (VC) method using sequence-to-sequence (seq2seq or S2S) learning, which flexibly converts not only the voice characteristics but also the pitch contour and duration of input speech. The proposed method, called ConvS2S-VC, has three key features. First, it uses a model with a fully…

We investigated the training of a shared model for both text-to-speech (TTS) and voice conversion (VC) tasks. We propose using an extended model architecture of Tacotron, that is a multi-source sequence-to-sequence model with a dual attention mechanism as the shared model for both the TTS and VC tasks. This model can a…

FastVoiceGrad speeds up VC to one step, matching or surpassing quality.

This paper proposes a non-parallel many-to-many voice conversion (VC) method using a variant of the conditional variational autoencoder (VAE) called an auxiliary classifier VAE (ACVAE). The proposed method has three key features. First, it adopts fully convolutional architectures to construct the encoder and decoder ne…

For training the sequence-to-sequence voice conversion model, we need to handle an issue of insufficient data about the number of speech pairs which consist of the same utterance. This study experimentally investigated the effects of Mel-spectrogram augmentation on training the sequence-to-sequence voice conversion (VC…

Although voice conversion (VC) algorithms have achieved remarkable success along with the development of machine learning, superior performance is still difficult to achieve when using nonparallel data. In this paper, we propose using a cycle-consistent adversarial network (CycleGAN) for nonparallel data-based VC train…

Inspired by recent work on neural network image generation which rely on backpropagation towards the network inputs, we present a proof-of-concept system for speech texture synthesis and voice conversion based on two mechanisms: approximate inversion of the representation learned by a speech recognition neural network,…

Most of the existing studies on voice conversion (VC) are conducted in acoustically matched conditions between source and target signal. However, the robustness of VC methods in presence of mismatch remains unknown. In this paper, we report a comparative analysis of different VC techniques under mismatched conditions. …

Thanks to the growing availability of spoofing databases and rapid advances in using them, systems for detecting voice spoofing attacks are becoming more and more capable, and error rates close to zero are being reached for the ASVspoof2015 database. However, speech synthesis and voice conversion paradigms that are not…

Humans are able to imagine a person's voice from the person's appearance and imagine the person's appearance from his/her voice. In this paper, we make the first attempt to develop a method that can convert speech into a voice that matches an input face image and generate a face image that matches the voice of the inpu…

An audiovisual speaker conversion method is presented for simultaneously transforming the facial expressions and voice of a source speaker into those of a target speaker. Transforming the facial and acoustic features together makes it possible for the converted voice and facial expressions to be highly correlated and f…

This paper proposes a method that allows non-parallel many-to-many voice conversion (VC) by using a variant of a generative adversarial network (GAN) called StarGAN. Our method, which we call StarGAN-VC, is noteworthy in that it (1) requires no parallel utterances, transcriptions, or time alignment procedures for speec…

Voice conversion (VC) aims at conversion of speaker characteristic without altering content. Due to training data limitations and modeling imperfections, it is difficult to achieve believable speaker mimicry without introducing processing artifacts; performance assessment of VC, therefore, usually involves both speaker…

VPFD uses vocoder features for adversarial training in VC.

CycleGAN-VC3 improves CycleGAN-VCs for mel-spectrogram conversion.

Voice-enabled interactions provide more human-like experiences in many popular IoT systems. Cloud-based speech analysis services extract useful information from voice input using speech recognition techniques. The voice signal is a rich resource that discloses several possible states of a speaker, such as emotional sta…

We propose a flexible framework that deals with both singer conversion and singers vocal technique conversion. The proposed model is trained on non-parallel corpora, accommodates many-to-many conversion, and leverages recent advances of variational autoencoders. It employs separate encoders to learn disentangled latent…

Have you ever wondered how a song might sound if performed by a different artist? In this work, we propose SCM-GAN, an end-to-end non-parallel song conversion system powered by generative adversarial and transfer learning that allows users to listen to a selected target singer singing any song. SCM-GAN first separates …

In this paper, we propose a dictionary update method for Nonnegative Matrix Factorization (NMF) with high dimensional data in a spectral conversion (SC) task. Voice conversion has been widely studied due to its potential applications such as personalized speech synthesis and speech enhancement. Exemplar-based NMF (ENMF…

The human auditory system is able to distinguish the vocal source of thousands of speakers, yet not much is known about what features the auditory system uses to do this. Fourier Transforms are capable of capturing the pitch and harmonic structure of the speaker but this alone proves insufficient at identifying speaker…

We propose a flexible framework for spectral conversion (SC) that facilitates training with unaligned corpora. Many SC frameworks require parallel corpora, phonetic alignments, or explicit frame-wise correspondence for learning conversion functions or for synthesizing a target spectrum with the aid of alignments. Howev…

This paper describes a method based on a sequence-to-sequence learning (Seq2Seq) with attention and context preservation mechanism for voice conversion (VC) tasks. Seq2Seq has been outstanding at numerous tasks involving sequence modeling such as speech synthesis and recognition, machine translation, and image captioni…

Sound source separation has attracted attention from Music Information Retrieval(MIR) researchers, since it is related to many MIR tasks such as automatic lyric transcription, singer identification, and voice conversion. In this paper, we propose an intuitive spectrogram-based model for source separation by adapting U-…

We present a TTS neural network that is able to produce speech in multiple languages. The proposed network is able to transfer a voice, which was presented as a sample in a source language, into one of several target languages. Training is done without using matching or parallel data, i.e., without samples of the same …

Non-parallel voice conversion (VC) is a technique for learning the mapping from source to target speech without relying on parallel data. This is an important task, but it has been challenging due to the disadvantages of the training conditions. Recently, CycleGAN-VC has provided a breakthrough and performed comparably…

We propose a parallel-data-free voice-conversion (VC) method that can learn a mapping from source to target speech without relying on parallel data. The proposed method is general purpose, high quality, and parallel-data free and works without any extra data, modules, or alignment procedure. It also avoids over-smoothi…

A new framework converts EEG signals between subjects and tasks.

Non-parallel multi-domain voice conversion (VC) is a technique for learning mappings among multiple domains without relying on parallel data. This is important but challenging owing to the requirement of learning multiple mappings and the non-availability of explicit supervision. Recently, StarGAN-VC has garnered atten…

Paper uses SSL models' uncertainty to predict audio quality efficiently.

We present the "Annotation and Benchmarking on Understanding and Transparency of Machine Learning Lifecycles" (ABOUT ML) project as an initiative to operationalize ML transparency and work towards a standard ML documentation practice. We make the case for the project's relevance and effectiveness in consolidating dispa…

Speech produced by human vocal apparatus conveys substantial non-semantic information including the gender of the speaker, voice quality, affective state, abnormalities in the vocal apparatus etc. Such information is attributed to the properties of the voice source signal, which is usually estimated from the speech sig…