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...

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...

Multi-Target Emotional Voice Conversion With Neural Vocoders

Emotional voice conversion (EVC) is one way to generate expressive synthetic speech. Previous approaches mainly focused on modeling one-to-one mapping, i.e., conversion from one emotional state to another emotional state, with Mel-cepstral vocoders. In this paper, we investigate building a multi-target EVC (MTEVC) architecture, which combines a deep bidirectional long-short term memory (DBLSTM)-based conversion model and a neural vocoder. Phonetic posteriorgrams (PPGs) containing rich linguistic information are incorporated into the conversion model as auxiliary input features, which boost the...

Emotional Voice Conversion With Cycle-consistent Adversarial Network

Emotional Voice Conversion, or emotional VC, is a technique of converting speech from one emotion state into another one, keeping the basic linguistic information and speaker identity. Previous approaches for emotional VC need parallel data and use dynamic time warping (DTW) method to temporally align the source-target speech parameters. These approaches often define a minimum generation loss as the objective function, such as L1 or L2 loss, to learn model parameters. Recently, cycle-consistent generative adversarial networks (CycleGAN) have been used successfully for non-parallel VC. This pap...