Any-to-Many Voice Conversion with Location-Relative Sequence-to-Sequence Modeling

This paper proposes an any-to-many location-relative, sequence-to-sequence (seq2seq), non-parallel voice conversion approach, which utilizes text supervision during training. In this approach, we combine a bottle-neck feature extractor (BNE) with a seq2seq synthesis module. During the training stage, an encoder-decoder-based hybrid connectionist-temporal-classification-attention (CTC-attention) phoneme recognizer is trained, whose encoder has a bottle-neck layer. A BNE is obtained from the phoneme recognizer and is utilized to extract speaker-independent, dense and rich spoken content represen...

Nonparallel Voice Conversion with Augmented Classifier Star Generative Adversarial Networks

We have previously proposed a method that allows for non-parallel voice conversion (VC) by using a variant of generative adversarial networks (GANs) called StarGAN. The main features of our method, called StarGAN-VC, are as follows: First, it requires no parallel utterances, transcriptions, or time alignment procedures for speech generator training. Second, it can simultaneously learn mappings across multiple domains using a single generator network so that it can fully exploit available training data collected from multiple domains to capture latent features that are common to all the domains...

Unsupervised Acoustic Unit Representation Learning for Voice Conversion using WaveNet Auto-encoders

Unsupervised representation learning of speech has been of keen interest in recent years, which is for example evident in the wide interest of the ZeroSpeech challenges. This work presents a new method for learning frame level representations based on WaveNet auto-encoders. Of particular interest in the ZeroSpeech Challenge 2019 were models with discrete latent variable such as the Vector Quantized Variational Auto-Encoder (VQVAE). However these models generate speech with relatively poor quality. In this work we aim to address this with two approaches: first WaveNet is used as the decoder and...

VAW-GAN for Singing Voice Conversion with Non-parallel Training Data

Singing voice conversion aims to convert singer's voice from source to target without changing singing content. Parallel training data is typically required for the training of singing voice conversion system, that is however not practical in real-life applications. Recent encoder-decoder structures, such as variational autoencoding Wasserstein generative adversarial network (VAW-GAN), provide an effective way to learn a mapping through non-parallel training data. In this paper, we propose a singing voice conversion framework that is based on VAW-GAN. We train an encoder to disentangle singer ...

DurIAN-SC: Duration Informed Attention Network based Singing Voice Conversion System

Singing voice conversion is converting the timbre in the source singing to the target speaker's voice while keeping singing content the same. However, singing data for target speaker is much more difficult to collect compared with normal speech data.In this paper, we introduce a singing voice conversion algorithm that is capable of generating high quality target speaker's singing using only his/her normal speech data. First, we manage to integrate the training and conversion process of speech and singing into one framework by unifying the features used in standard speech synthesis system and s...

Unsupervised Cross-Domain Singing Voice Conversion

We present a wav-to-wav generative model for the task of singing voice conversion from any identity. Our method utilizes both an acoustic model, trained for the task of automatic speech recognition, together with melody extracted features to drive a waveform-based generator. The proposed generative architecture is invariant to the speaker's identity and can be trained to generate target singers from unlabeled training data, using either speech or singing sources. The model is optimized in an end-to-end fashion without any manual supervision, such as lyrics, musical notes or parallel samples. T...

Recognition-Synthesis Based Non-Parallel Voice Conversion with Adversarial Learning

This paper presents an adversarial learning method for recognition-synthesis based non-parallel voice conversion. A recognizer is used to transform acoustic features into linguistic representations while a synthesizer recovers output features from the recognizer outputs together with the speaker identity. By separating the speaker characteristics from the linguistic representations, voice conversion can be achieved by replacing the speaker identity with the target one. In our proposed method, a speaker adversarial loss is adopted in order to obtain speaker-independent linguistic representation...

VQVC+: One-Shot Voice Conversion by Vector Quantization and U-Net architecture

Voice conversion (VC) is a task that transforms the source speaker's timbre, accent, and tones in audio into another one's while preserving the linguistic content. It is still a challenging work, especially in a one-shot setting. Auto-encoder-based VC methods disentangle the speaker and the content in input speech without given the speaker's identity, so these methods can further generalize to unseen speakers. The disentangle capability is achieved by vector quantization (VQ), adversarial training, or instance normalization (IN). However, the imperfect disentanglement may harm the quality of o...

Transferring Source Style in Non-Parallel Voice Conversion

Voice conversion (VC) techniques aim to modify speaker identity of an utterance while preserving the underlying linguistic information. Most VC approaches ignore modeling of the speaking style (e.g. emotion and emphasis), which may contain the factors intentionally added by the speaker and should be retained during conversion. This study proposes a sequence-to-sequence based non-parallel VC approach, which has the capability of transferring the speaking style from the source speech to the converted speech by explicitly modeling. Objective evaluation and subjective listening tests show superior...

Converting Anyone's Emotion: Towards Speaker-Independent Emotional Voice Conversion

Emotional voice conversion aims to convert the emotion of the speech from one state to another while preserving the linguistic content and speaker identity. The prior studies on emotional voice conversion are mostly carried out under the assumption that emotion is speaker-dependent. We believe that emotions are expressed universally across speakers, therefore, the speaker-independent mapping between emotional states of speech is possible. In this paper, we propose to build a speaker-independent emotional voice conversion framework, that can convert anyone's emotion without the need for paralle...