Multi-target Voice Conversion without Parallel Data by Adversarially Learning Disentangled Audio Representations

Recently, cycle-consistent adversarial network (Cycle-GAN) has been successfully applied to voice conversion to a different speaker without parallel data, although in those approaches an individual model is needed for each target speaker. In this paper, we propose an adversarial learning framework for voice conversion, with which a single model can be trained to convert the voice to many different speakers, all without parallel data, by separating the speaker characteristics from the linguistic content in speech signals. An autoencoder is first trained to extract speaker-independent latent rep...

Voice Conversion from Unaligned Corpora using Variational Autoencoding Wasserstein Generative Adversarial Networks

Building a voice conversion (VC) system from non-parallel speech corpora is challenging but highly valuable in real application scenarios. In most situations, the source and the target speakers do not repeat the same texts or they may even speak different languages. In this case, one possible, although indirect, solution is to build a generative model for speech. Generative models focus on explaining the observations with latent variables instead of learning a pairwise transformation function, thereby bypassing the requirement of speech frame alignment. In this paper, we propose a non-parallel...

Dictionary Update for NMF-based Voice Conversion Using an Encoder-Decoder Network

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) emerges as an effective and probably the simplest choice among all techniques for SC, as long as a source-target parallel speech corpus is given. ENMF-based SC systems usually need a large amount of bases (exemplars) to ensure the quality of the converted speech. However, a sma...

Voice Conversion from Non-parallel Corpora Using Variational Auto-encoder

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. However, these requirements gravely limit the scope of practical applications of SC due to scarcity or even unavailability of parallel corpora. We propose an SC framework based on variational auto-encoder which enables us to exploit non-parallel corpora. The framework comprises an enc...

High quality voice conversion using prosodic and high-resolution spectral features

Voice conversion methods have advanced rapidly over the last decade. Studies have shown that speaker characteristics are captured by spectral feature as well as various prosodic features. Most existing conversion methods focus on the spectral feature as it directly represents the timbre characteristics, while some conversion methods have focused only on the prosodic feature represented by the fundamental frequency. In this paper, a comprehensive framework using deep neural networks to convert both timbre and prosodic features is proposed. The timbre feature is represented by a high-resolution ...