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...

Non-parallel voice conversion based on source-to-target direct mapping

Recent works of utilizing phonetic posteriograms (PPGs) for non-parallel voice conversion have significantly increased the usability of voice conversion since the source and target DBs are no longer required for matching contents. In this approach, the PPGs are used as the linguistic bridge between source and target speaker features. However, this PPG-based non-parallel voice conversion has some limitation that it needs two cascading networks at conversion time, making it less suitable for real-time applications and vulnerable to source speaker intelligibility at conversion stage. To address t...

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...

Defending Your Voice: Adversarial Attack on Voice Conversion

Substantial improvements have been achieved in recent years in voice conversion, which converts the speaker characteristics of an utterance into those of another speaker without changing the linguistic content of the utterance. Nonetheless, the improved conversion technologies also led to concerns about privacy and authentication. It thus becomes highly desired to be able to prevent one's voice from being improperly utilized with such voice conversion technologies. This is why we report in this paper the first known attempt to try to perform adversarial attack on voice conversion. We introduce...

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...

Scyclone: High-Quality and Parallel-Data-Free Voice Conversion Using Spectrogram and Cycle-Consistent Adversarial Networks

This paper proposes Scyclone, a high-quality voice conversion (VC) technique without parallel data training. Scyclone improves speech naturalness and speaker similarity of the converted speech by introducing CycleGAN-based spectrogram conversion with a simplified WaveRNN-based vocoder. In Scyclone, a linear spectrogram is used as the conversion features instead of vocoder parameters, which avoids quality degradation due to extraction errors in fundamental frequency and voiced/unvoiced parameters. The spectrogram of source and target speakers are modeled by modified CycleGAN networks, and the w...

Cotatron: Transcription-Guided Speech Encoder for Any-to-Many Voice Conversion without Parallel Data

We propose Cotatron, a transcription-guided speech encoder for speaker-independent linguistic representation. Cotatron is based on the multispeaker TTS architecture and can be trained with conventional TTS datasets. We train a voice conversion system to reconstruct speech with Cotatron features, which is similar to the previous methods based on Phonetic Posteriorgram (PPG). By training and evaluating our system with 108 speakers from the VCTK dataset, we outperform the previous method in terms of both naturalness and speaker similarity. Our system can also convert speech from speakers that are...

F0-consistent many-to-many non-parallel voice conversion via conditional autoencoder

Non-parallel many-to-many voice conversion remains an interesting but challenging speech processing task. Many style-transfer-inspired methods such as generative adversarial networks (GANs) and variational autoencoders (VAEs) have been proposed. Recently, AutoVC, a conditional autoencoders (CAEs) based method achieved state-of-the-art results by disentangling the speaker identity and speech content using information-constraining bottlenecks, and it achieves zero-shot conversion by swapping in a different speaker's identity embedding to synthesize a new voice. However, we found that while speak...