Category: Generative Adversarial Network

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Transforming Spectrum and Prosody for Emotional Voice Conversion with Non-Parallel Training Data

Emotional voice conversion is to convert the spectrum and prosody to change the emotional patterns of speech, while preserving the speaker identity and linguistic content. Many studies require parallel speech data between different emotional patterns, which is not practical in real life. Moreover, they often model the conversion of fundamental frequency (F0) with a simple linear transform. As F0 is a key aspect of intonation that is hierarchical in nature, we believe that it is more adequate to model F0 in different temporal scales by using wavelet transform. We propose a CycleGAN network to f...

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Non-Parallel Sequence-to-Sequence Voice Conversion with Disentangled Linguistic and Speaker Representations

This paper presents a method of sequence-to-sequence (seq2seq) voice conversion using non-parallel training data. In this method, disentangled linguistic and speaker representations are extracted from acoustic features, and voice conversion is achieved by preserving the linguistic representations of source utterances while replacing the speaker representations with the target ones. Our model is built under the framework of encoder-decoder neural networks. A recognition encoder is designed to learn the disentangled linguistic representations with two strategies. First, phoneme transcriptions of...

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MelGAN-VC: Voice Conversion and Audio Style Transfer on arbitrarily long samples using Spectrograms

Traditional voice conversion methods rely on parallel recordings of multiple speakers pronouncing the same sentences. For real-world applications however, parallel data is rarely available. We propose MelGAN-VC, a voice conversion method that relies on non-parallel speech data and is able to convert audio signals of arbitrary length from a source voice to a target voice. We firstly compute spectrograms from waveform data and then perform a domain translation using a Generative Adversarial Network (GAN) architecture. An additional siamese network helps preserving speech information in the trans...

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SoftGAN: Learning generative models efficiently with application to CycleGAN Voice Conversion

Voice conversion with deep neural networks has become extremely popular over the last few years with improvements over the past VC architectures. In particular, GAN architectures such as the cycleGAN and the VAEGAN have offered the possibility to learn voice conversion from non-parallel databases. However, GAN-based methods are highly unstable, requiring often a careful tuning of hyper-parameters, and can lead to poor voice identity conversion and substantially degraded converted speech signal. This paper discusses and tackles the stability issues of the GAN in the context of voice conversion....

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AdaGAN: Adaptive GAN for Many-to-Many Non-Parallel Voice Conversion

Voice Conversion (VC) is a task of converting perceived speaker identity from a source speaker to a particular target speaker. Earlier approaches in the literature primarily find a mapping between the given source-target speaker-pairs. Developing mapping techniques for many-to-many VC using non-parallel data, including zero-shot learning remains less explored areas in VC. Most of the many-to-many VC architectures require training data from all the target speakers for whom we want to convert the voices. In this paper, we propose a novel style transfer architecture, which can also be extended to...

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Many-to-Many Voice Conversion using Cycle-Consistent Variational Autoencoder with Multiple Decoders

One of the obstacles in many-to-many voice conversion is the requirement of the parallel training data, which contain pairs of utterances with the same linguistic content spoken by different speakers. Since collecting such parallel data is a highly expensive task, many works attempted to use non-parallel training data for many-to-many voice conversion. One of such approaches is using the variational autoencoder (VAE). Though it can handle many-to-many voice conversion without the parallel training, the VAE based voice conversion methods suffer from low sound qualities of the converted speech. ...

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StarGAN-VC2: Rethinking Conditional Methods for StarGAN-Based Voice Conversion

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 attention owing to its ability to solve this problem only using a single generator. However, there is still a gap between real and converted speech. To bridge this gap, we rethink conditional methods of StarGAN-VC, which are key components for achieving non-parallel multi-domain VC in...

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Measuring the Effectiveness of Voice Conversion on Speaker Identification and Automatic Speech Recognition Systems

This paper evaluates the effectiveness of a Cycle-GAN based voice converter (VC) on four speaker identification (SID) systems and an automated speech recognition (ASR) system for various purposes. Audio samples converted by the VC model are classified by the SID systems as the intended target at up to 46% top-1 accuracy among more than 250 speakers. This encouraging result in imitating the target styles led us to investigate if converted (synthetic) samples can be used to improve ASR training. Unfortunately, adding synthetic data to the ASR training set only marginally improves word and charac...

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Many-to-Many Voice Conversion with Out-of-Dataset Speaker Support

We present a Cycle-GAN based many-to-many voice conversion method that can convert between speakers that are not in the training set. This property is enabled through speaker embeddings generated by a neural network that is jointly trained with the Cycle-GAN. In contrast to prior work in this domain, our method enables conversion between an out-of-dataset speaker and a target speaker in either direction and does not require re-training. Out-of-dataset speaker conversion quality is evaluated using an independently trained speaker identification model, and shows good style conversion characteris...

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CycleGAN-VC2: Improved CycleGAN-based Non-parallel Voice Conversion

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 to a parallel VC method without relying on any extra data, modules, or time alignment procedures. However, there is still a large gap between the real target and converted speech, and bridging this gap remains a challenge. To reduce this gap, we propose CycleGAN-VC2, which is an...

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