Thanks to improvements in machine learning techniques, including deep learning, speech synthesis is becoming a machine learning task. To accelerate speech synthesis research, we are developing Japanese voice corpora reasonably accessible from not only academic institutions but also commercial companies. In 2017, we released the JSUT corpus, which contains 10 hours of reading-style speech uttered by a single speaker, for end-to-end text-to-speech synthesis. For more general use in speech synthesis research, e.g., voice conversion and multi-speaker modeling, in this paper, we construct the JVS corpus, which contains voice data of 100 speakers in three styles (normal, whisper, and falsetto). The corpus contains 30 hours of voice data including 22 hours of parallel normal voices. This paper describes how we designed the corpus and summarizes the specifications. The corpus is available at our project page.
Graduate School of Information Science and Technology, The University of Tokyo（东京大学信息科学与技术研究生院）
Thanks to developments in machine learning techniques, it has become possible to synthesize high-quality singing voices of a single singer. An open multispeaker singing-voice corpus would further accelerate the research in singing-voice synthesis. However, conventional singing-voice corpora only consist of the singing voices of a single singer. We designed a Japanese multispeaker singing-voice corpus called "JVS-MuSiC" with the aim to analyze and synthesize a variety of voices. The corpus consists of 100 singers' recordings of the same song, Katatsumuri, which is a Japanese children's song. It…
Sequence-to-sequence (seq2seq) voice conversion (VC) models have greater potential in converting electrolaryngeal (EL) speech to normal speech (EL2SP) compared to conventional VC models. However, EL2SP based on seq2seq VC requires a sufficiently large amount of parallel data for the model training and it suffers from significant performance degradation when the amount of training data is insufficient. To address this issue, we suggest a novel, two-stage strategy to optimize the performance on EL2SP based on seq2seq VC when a small amount of the parallel dataset is available. In contrast to uti…
This paper shows that StarGAN-VC, a spectral envelope transformation method for non-parallel many-to-many voice conversion (VC), is capable of emotional VC (EVC). Although StarGAN-VC has been shown to enable speaker identity conversion, its capability for EVC for Japanese phrases has not been clarified. In this paper, we describe the direct application of StarGAN-VC to an EVC task with minimal fundamental frequency and aperiodicity processing. Through subjective evaluation experiments, we evaluated the performance of our StarGAN-EVC system in terms of its ability to achieve EVC for Japanese ph…
The University of Tokyo（东京大学）；Tokyo Metropolitan University（东京都立大学）
In this paper, we construct a new Japanese speech corpus for speech-based summarization and simplification, "JSSS" (pronounced "j-triple-s"). Given the success of reading-style speech synthesis from short-form sentences, we aim to design more difficult tasks for delivering information to humans. Our corpus contains voices recorded for two tasks that have a role in providing information under constraints: duration-constrained text-to-speech summarization and speaking-style simplification. It also contains utterances of long-form sentences as an optional task. This paper describes how we designe…
In this paper, we construct a Japanese audiobook speech corpus called "J-MAC" for speech synthesis research. With the success of reading-style speech synthesis, the research target is shifting to tasks that use complicated contexts. Audiobook speech synthesis is a good example that requires cross-sentence, expressiveness, etc. Unlike reading-style speech, speaker-specific expressiveness in audiobook speech also becomes the context. To enhance this research, we propose a method of constructing a corpus from audiobooks read by professional speakers. From many audiobooks and their texts, our meth…
We present STUDIES, a new speech corpus for developing a voice agent that can speak in a friendly manner. Humans naturally control their speech prosody to empathize with each other. By incorporating this "empathetic dialogue" behavior into a spoken dialogue system, we can develop a voice agent that can respond to a user more naturally. We designed the STUDIES corpus to include a speaker who speaks with empathy for the interlocutor's emotion explicitly. We describe our methodology to construct an empathetic dialogue speech corpus and report the analysis results of the STUDIES corpus. We conduct…
Graduate School of Engineering Science, Osaka University（大阪大学工学研究科）；Advanced Telecommunications Research Institute International（国际高级电信研究所）；RIKEN（理化学研究所）
In this study, we explore the transformer's ability to capture intra-relations among frames by augmenting the receptive field of models. Concretely, we propose a CycleGAN-based model with the transformer and investigate its ability in the emotional voice conversion task. In the training procedure, we adopt curriculum learning to gradually increase the frame length so that the model can see from the short segment till the entire speech. The proposed method was evaluated on the Japanese emotional speech dataset and compared to several baselines (ACVAE, CycleGAN) with objective and subjective eva…
This paper proposes a novel voice conversion (VC) method based on non-autoregressive sequence-to-sequence (NAR-S2S) models. Inspired by the great success of NAR-S2S models such as FastSpeech in text-to-speech (TTS), we extend the FastSpeech2 model for the VC problem. We introduce the convolution-augmented Transformer (Conformer) instead of the Transformer, making it possible to capture both local and global context information from the input sequence. Furthermore, we extend variance predictors to variance converters to explicitly convert the source speaker's prosody components such as pitch an…
Meiji University（明治大学）；The University of Tokyo（东京大学）
This paper presents a free Japanese singing voice corpus that can be used for highly applicable and reproducible singing voice synthesis research. A singing voice corpus helps develop singing voice synthesis, but existing corpora have two critical problems: data imbalance (singing voice corpora do not guarantee phoneme balance, unlike speaking-voice corpora) and copyright issues (cannot legally share data). As a way to avoid these problems, we constructed a PJS (phoneme-balanced Japanese singing voice) corpus that guarantees phoneme balance and is licensed with CC BY-SA 4.0, and we composed me…
1 LINE Corp., Tokyo, Japan 2 NAVER Corp., Seongnam, Korea 3 Search Solutions Inc., Seongnam, Korea
This paper proposes voicing-aware conditional discriminators for Parallel WaveGAN-based waveform synthesis systems. In this framework, we adopt a projection-based conditioning method that can significantly improve the discriminator's performance. Furthermore, the conventional discriminator is separated into two waveform discriminators for modeling voiced and unvoiced speech. As each discriminator learns the distinctive characteristics of the harmonic and noise components, respectively, the adversarial training process becomes more efficient, allowing the generator to produce more realistic spe…
JaCappella Corpus: A Japanese a Cappella Vocal Ensemble Corpus
Graduate School of Information Science and Technology, The University of Tokyo（东京大学信息科学与技术研究生院）；National Institute of Advanced Industrial Science and Technology (AIST)（国立研究开发法人产业技术综合研究所（AIST））
CrossSinger: A Cross-Lingual Multi-Singer High-Fidelity Singing Voice Synthesizer Trained on Monolingual Singers
Beijing Bombax XiaoIce Technology Co., Ltd（北京木棉小冰科技有限公司）；National Institute of Informatics（国立信息学研究所）；SOKENDAI（综合研究大学院大学）；Shenzhen International Graduate School, Tsinghua University（清华大学深圳国际研究生院）
Peking University（北京大学）；Microsoft Research Asia（微软亚洲研究院）
We propose a unified framework for low resource automatic speech recognition tasks named meta audio concatenation (MAC). It is easy to implement and can be carried out in extremely low resource environments. Mathematically, we give a clear description of MAC framework from the perspective of bayesian sampling. In this framework, we leverage a novel concatenative synthesis text-to-speech system to boost the low resource ASR task. By the concatenative synthesis text-to-speech system, we can integrate language pronunciation rules and adjust the TTS process. Furthermore, we propose a broad notion …
Developing vocal system impaired patient-aimed voice quality assessment approach using ASR representation-included multiple features
Graduate School of Informatics, Nagoya University（名古屋大学信息学研究科）；School of Informatics, Daido University（大同大学信息学研究科）；Nagoya University Graduate School of Medicine（名古屋大学大学院医学系研究科）；Aichi Gakuin University（爱知学院大学）；Nagoya University（名古屋大学）
Graduate School of Informatics, Kyoto University（京都大学信息学研究科）
Ainu is an unwritten language that has been spoken by Ainu people who are one of the ethnic groups in Japan. It is recognized as critically endangered by UNESCO and archiving and documentation of its language heritage is of paramount importance. Although a considerable amount of voice recordings of Ainu folklore has been produced and accumulated to save their culture, only a quite limited parts of them are transcribed so far. Thus, we started a project of automatic speech recognition (ASR) for the Ainu language in order to contribute to the development of annotated language archives. In this p…
