We propose a novel training scheme to optimize voice conversion network with a speaker identity loss function. The training scheme not only minimizes frame-level spectral loss, but also speaker identity loss. We introduce a cycle consistency loss that constrains the converted speech to maintain the same speaker identity as reference speech at utterance level. While the proposed training scheme is applicable to any voice conversion networks, we formulate the study under the average model voice conversion framework in this paper. Experiments conducted on CMU-ARCTIC and CSTR-VCTK corpus confirm that the proposed method outperforms baseline methods in terms of speaker similarity.
Recently, more and more zero-shot voice conversion algorithms have been proposed. As a fundamental part of zero-shot voice conversion, speaker embeddings are the key to improving the converted speech's speaker similarity. In this paper, we study the impact of speaker embeddings on zero-shot voice conversion performance. To better represent the characteristics of the target speaker and improve the speaker similarity in zero-shot voice conversion, we propose a novel speaker representation method in this paper. Our method combines the advantages of D-vector, global style token (GST) based speaker…
Neosapience（尼奥萨匹恩斯）；Korea Advanced Institute of Science and Technology（韩国科学技术院）
We propose a neural text-to-speech (TTS) model that can imitate a new speaker's voice using only a small amount of speech sample. We demonstrate voice imitation using only a 6-seconds long speech sample without any other information such as transcripts. Our model also enables voice imitation instantly without additional training of the model. We implemented the voice imitating TTS model by combining a speaker embedder network with a state-of-the-art TTS model, Tacotron. The speaker embedder network takes a new speaker's speech sample and returns a speaker embedding. The speaker embedding with …
Data efficient voice cloning aims at synthesizing target speaker's voice with only a few enrollment samples at hand. To this end, speaker adaptation and speaker encoding are two typical methods based on base model trained from multiple speakers. The former uses a small set of target speaker data to transfer the multi-speaker model to target speaker's voice through direct model update, while in the latter, only a few seconds of target speaker's audio directly goes through an extra speaker encoding model along with the multi-speaker model to synthesize target speaker's voice without model update…
One-shot voice conversion has received significant attention since only one utterance from source speaker and target speaker respectively is required. Moreover, source speaker and target speaker do not need to be seen during training. However, available one-shot voice conversion approaches are not stable for unseen speakers as the speaker embedding extracted from one utterance of an unseen speaker is not reliable. In this paper, we propose a deep discriminative speaker encoder to extract speaker embedding from one utterance more effectively. Specifically, the speaker encoder first integrates r…
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 c…
Singapore University of Technology and Design（新加坡科技设计大学）；National University of Singapore（新加坡国立大学）；The Chinese University of Hong Kong, Shenzhen（香港中文大学（深圳））
Expressive voice conversion performs identity conversion for emotional speakers by jointly converting speaker identity and emotional style. Due to the hierarchical structure of speech emotion, it is challenging to disentangle the emotional style for different speakers. Inspired by the recent success of speaker disentanglement with variational autoencoder (VAE), we propose an any-to-any expressive voice conversion framework, that is called StyleVC. StyleVC is designed to disentangle linguistic content, speaker identity, pitch, and emotional style information. We study the use of style encoder t…
Yitu Technology（依图科技）；National University of Singapore（新加坡国立大学）
Non-parallel many-to-many voice conversion is recently attract-ing huge research efforts in the speech processing community. A voice conversion system transforms an utterance of a source speaker to another utterance of a target speaker by keeping the content in the original utterance and replacing by the vocal features from the target speaker. Existing solutions, e.g., StarGAN-VC2, present promising results, only when speech corpus of the engaged speakers is available during model training. AUTOVCis able to perform voice conversion on unseen speakers, but it needs an external pretrained speake…
Singapore University of Technology and Design（新加坡科技设计大学）；National University of Singapore（新加坡国立大学）；The Chinese University of Hong Kong (Shenzhen)（香港中文大学（深圳））
Traditional voice conversion(VC) has been focused on speaker identity conversion for speech with a neutral expression. We note that emotional expression plays an essential role in daily communication, and the emotional style of speech can be speaker-dependent. In this paper, we study the technique to jointly convert the speaker identity and speaker-dependent emotional style, that is called expressive voice conversion. We propose a StarGAN-based framework to learn a many-to-many mapping across different speakers, that takes into account speaker-dependent emotional style without the need for par…
One-shot voice cloning aims to transform speaker voice and speaking style in speech synthesized from a text-to-speech (TTS) system, where only a shot recording from the target reference speech can be used. Out-of-domain transfer is still a challenging task, and one important aspect that impacts the accuracy and similarity of synthetic speech is the conditional representations carrying speaker or style cues extracted from the limited references. In this paper, we present a novel one-shot voice cloning algorithm called Unet-TTS that has good generalization ability for unseen speakers and styles.…
Voice style transfer, also called voice conversion, seeks to modify one speaker's voice to generate speech as if it came from another (target) speaker. Previous works have made progress on voice conversion with parallel training data and pre-known speakers. However, zero-shot voice style transfer, which learns from non-parallel data and generates voices for previously unseen speakers, remains a challenging problem. We propose a novel zero-shot voice transfer method via disentangled representation learning. The proposed method first encodes speaker-related style and voice content of each input …
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…
School of Electrical Engineering, KAIST（韩国科学技术院电气工程学院）
In this paper, we explore the possibility of speech synthesis from low quality found data using only limited number of samples of target speaker. We try to extract only the speaker embedding from found data of target speaker unlike previous works which tries to train the entire text-to-speech system on found data. Also, the two speaker mimicking approaches which are adaptation and speaker-encoder-based are applied on newly released LibriTTS dataset and previously released VCTK corpus to examine the impact of speaker variety on clarity and target-speaker-similarity .
University of Science and Technology of China（中国科学技术大学）
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…
This paper proposes an interesting voice and accent joint conversion approach, which can convert an arbitrary source speaker's voice to a target speaker with non-native accent. This problem is challenging as each target speaker only has training data in native accent and we need to disentangle accent and speaker information in the conversion model training and re-combine them in the conversion stage. In our recognition-synthesis conversion framework, we manage to solve this problem by two proposed tricks. First, we use accent-dependent speech recognizers to obtain bottleneck features for diffe…
This paper presents the CUHK-EE voice cloning system for ICASSP 2021 M2VoC challenge. The challenge provides two Mandarin speech corpora: the AIShell-3 corpus of 218 speakers with noise and reverberation and the MST corpus including high-quality speech of one male and one female speakers. 100 and 5 utterances of 3 target speakers in different voice and style are provided in track 1 and 2 respectively, and the participants are required to synthesize speech in target speaker's voice and style. We take part in the track 1 and carry out voice cloning based on 100 utterances of target speakers. An …
Residual Speaker Representation for One-Shot Voice Conversion
School of Artificial Intelligence, University of Chinese Academy of Sciences（中国科学院大学人工智能学院）；Institute of Automation, Chinese Academy of Sciences（中国科学院自动化研究所）；Tsinghua University（清华大学）；Qiyuan Laboratory（启元实验室）
Duke Kunshan University（昆山杜克大学）；Sun Yat-sen University（中山大学）；Wuhan University（武汉大学）；Advanced Computing East China Sub-center（先进计算华东分中心）
Building cross-lingual voice conversion (VC) systems for multiple speakers and multiple languages has been a challenging task for a long time. This paper describes a parallel non-autoregressive network to achieve bilingual and code-switched voice conversion for multiple speakers when there are only mono-lingual corpora for each language. We achieve cross-lingual VC between Mandarin speech with multiple speakers and English speech with multiple speakers by applying bilingual bottleneck features. To boost voice cloning performance, we use an adversarial speaker classifier with a gradient reversa…
We study the problem of cross-lingual voice conversion in non-parallel speech corpora and one-shot learning setting. Most prior work require either parallel speech corpora or enough amount of training data from a target speaker. However, we convert an arbitrary sentences of an arbitrary source speaker to target speaker's given only one target speaker training utterance. To achieve this, we formulate the problem as learning disentangled speaker-specific and context-specific representations and follow the idea of [1] which uses Factorized Hierarchical Variational Autoencoder (FHVAE). After train…
Building a voice conversion system for noisy target speakers, such as users providing noisy samples or Internet found data, is a challenging task since the use of contaminated speech in model training will apparently degrade the conversion performance. In this paper, we leverage the advances of our recently proposed Glow-WaveGAN and propose a noise-independent speech representation learning approach for high-quality voice conversion for noisy target speakers. Specifically, we learn a latent feature space where we ensure that the target distribution modeled by the conversion model is exactly fr…
In this paper, we focus on improving the performance of the text-dependent speaker verification system in the scenario of limited training data. The speaker verification system deep learning based text-dependent generally needs a large scale text-dependent training data set which could be labor and cost expensive, especially for customized new wake-up words. In recent studies, voice conversion systems that can generate high quality synthesized speech of seen and unseen speakers have been proposed. Inspired by those works, we adopt two different voice conversion methods as well as the very simp…
University of Science and Technology of China（中国科学技术大学）
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…
One-shot style transfer is a challenging task, since training on one utterance makes model extremely easy to over-fit to training data and causes low speaker similarity and lack of expressiveness. In this paper, we build on the recognition-synthesis framework and propose a one-shot voice conversion approach for style transfer based on speaker adaptation. First, a speaker normalization module is adopted to remove speaker-related information in bottleneck features extracted by ASR. Second, we adopt weight regularization in the adaptation process to prevent over-fitting caused by using only one u…
The ideal goal of voice conversion is to convert the source speaker's speech to sound naturally like the target speaker while maintaining the linguistic content and the prosody of the source speech. However, current approaches are insufficient to achieve comprehensive source prosody transfer and target speaker timbre preservation in the converted speech, and the quality of the converted speech is also unsatisfied due to the mismatch between the acoustic model and the vocoder. In this paper, we leverage the recent advances in information perturbation and propose a fully end-to-end approach to c…
Many-to-many voice conversion with non-parallel training data has seen significant progress in recent years. StarGAN-based models have been interests of voice conversion. However, most of the StarGAN-based methods only focused on voice conversion experiments for the situations where the number of speakers was small, and the amount of training data was large. In this work, we aim at improving the data efficiency of the model and achieving a many-to-many non-parallel StarGAN-based voice conversion for a relatively large number of speakers with limited training samples. In order to improve data e…
We present progress towards bilingual Text-to-Speech which is able to transform a monolingual voice to speak a second language while preserving speaker voice quality. We demonstrate that a bilingual speaker embedding space contains a separate distribution for each language and that a simple transform in speaker space generated by the speaker embedding can be used to control the degree of accent of a synthetic voice in a language. The same transform can be applied even to monolingual speakers. In our experiments speaker data from an English-Spanish (Mexican) bilingual speaker was used, and the …
DS-TTS: Zero-Shot Speaker Style Adaptation from Voice Clips via Dynamic Dual-Style Feature Modulation
School of Data Science and Media Intelligence, Communication University of China（数据科学与媒体智能学院，中国传媒大学）；Psyche AI Inc. Beijing, China（北京Psyche AI公司，中国）；Hainan International College, Communication University of China（海南国际学院，中国传媒大学）；Hangzhou International Innovation Institute, Beihang University（杭州国际创新研究院，北京理工大学）
Typically, singing voice conversion (SVC) depends on an embedding vector, extracted from either a speaker lookup table (LUT) or a speaker recognition network (SRN), to model speaker identity. However, singing contains more expressive speaker characteristics than conversational speech. It is suspected that a single embedding vector may only capture averaged and coarse-grained speaker characteristics, which is insufficient for the SVC task. To this end, this work proposes a novel hierarchical speaker representation framework for SVC, which can capture fine-grained speaker characteristics at diff…
Northwestern Polytechnical University（西北工业大学）；National University of Singapore（新加坡国立大学）；The Chinese University of Hong Kong (Shenzhen)（香港中文大学（深圳））
Voice conversion has made great progress in the past few years under the studio-quality test scenario in terms of speech quality and speaker similarity. However, in real applications, test speech from source speaker or target speaker can be corrupted by various environment noises, which seriously degrade the speech quality and speaker similarity. In this paper, we propose a novel encoder-decoder based noise-robust voice conversion framework, which consists of a speaker encoder, a content encoder, a decoder, and two domain adversarial neural networks. Specifically, we integrate disentangling sp…
Recently, cycle-consistent adversarial network (Cycle-GAN) has been successfully applied to voice conversion to a different speaker without parallel data, although in those approaches an individual model is needed for each target speaker. In this paper, we propose an adversarial learning framework for voice conversion, with which a single model can be trained to convert the voice to many different speakers, all without parallel data, by separating the speaker characteristics from the linguistic content in speech signals. An autoencoder is first trained to extract speaker-independent latent rep…
Neural TTS has shown it can generate high quality synthesized speech. In this paper, we investigate the multi-speaker latent space to improve neural TTS for adapting the system to new speakers with only several minutes of speech or enhancing a premium voice by utilizing the data from other speakers for richer contextual coverage and better generalization. A multi-speaker neural TTS model is built with the embedded speaker information in both spectral and speaker latent space. The experimental results show that, with less than 5 minutes of training data from a new speaker, the new model can ach…
Voice conversion (VC) techniques can be abused by malicious parties to transform their audios to sound like a target speaker, making it hard for a human being or a speaker verification/identification system to trace the source speaker. In this paper, we make the first attempt to restore the source voiceprint from audios synthesized by voice conversion methods with high credit. However, unveiling the features of the source speaker from a converted audio is challenging since the voice conversion operation intends to disentangle the original features and infuse the features of the target speaker.…
The task of few-shot style transfer for voice cloning in text-to-speech (TTS) synthesis aims at transferring speaking styles of an arbitrary source speaker to a target speaker's voice using very limited amount of neutral data. This is a very challenging task since the learning algorithm needs to deal with few-shot voice cloning and speaker-prosody disentanglement at the same time. Accelerating the adaptation process for a new target speaker is of importance in real-world applications, but even more challenging. In this paper, we approach to the hard fast few-shot style transfer for voice cloni…
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 perform adversarial attack on voice conversion. We introduce human …
Vinai Research（维奈研究院）；Deezer Research and Development（迪泽研发中心）
Voice conversion is a challenging task which transforms the voice characteristics of a source speaker to a target speaker without changing linguistic content. Recently, there have been many works on many-to-many Voice Conversion (VC) based on Variational Autoencoder (VAEs) achieving good results, however, these methods lack the ability to disentangle speaker identity and linguistic content to achieve good performance on unseen speaker scenarios. In this paper, we propose a new method based on feature disentanglement to tackle many to many voice conversion. The method has the capability to dise…
Singapore University of Technology and Design（新加坡科技设计大学）；National Institute of Informatics（国立信息学研究所）；University of Edinburgh（爱丁堡大学）；National University of Singapore（新加坡国立大学）
Speaker identity is one of the important characteristics of human speech. In voice conversion, we change the speaker identity from one to another, while keeping the linguistic content unchanged. Voice conversion involves multiple speech processing techniques, such as speech analysis, spectral conversion, prosody conversion, speaker characterization, and vocoding. With the recent advances in theory and practice, we are now able to produce human-like voice quality with high speaker similarity. In this paper, we provide a comprehensive overview of the state-of-the-art of voice conversion techniqu…
Institute of Acoustics, Chinese Academy of Sciences（中国科学院声学研究所）；University of Chinese Academy of Sciences（中国科学院大学）
Voice conversion models have developed for decades, and current mainstream research focuses on non-streaming voice conversion. However, streaming voice conversion is more suitable for practical application scenarios than non-streaming voice conversion. In this paper, we propose a streaming any-to-many voice conversion based on fully non-autoregressive model, which includes a streaming transformer based acoustic model and a streaming vocoder. Streaming transformer based acoustic model is composed of a pre-trained encoder from streaming end-to-end based automatic speech recognition model and a d…
Logitech Europe S.A.（罗技欧洲公司）；École Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne (EPFL)（洛桑联邦理工学院（EPFL））
This paper presents AC-VC (Almost Causal Voice Conversion), a phonetic posteriorgrams based voice conversion system that can perform any-to-many voice conversion while having only 57.5 ms future look-ahead. The complete system is composed of three neural networks trained separately with non-parallel data. While most of the current voice conversion systems focus primarily on quality irrespective of algorithmic latency, this work elaborates on designing a method using a minimal amount of future context thus allowing a future real-time implementation. According to a subjective listening test orga…
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…
This paper introduces Taco-VC, a novel architecture for voice conversion based on Tacotron synthesizer, which is a sequence-to-sequence with attention model. The training of multi-speaker voice conversion systems requires a large number of resources, both in training and corpus size. Taco-VC is implemented using a single speaker Tacotron synthesizer based on Phonetic PosteriorGrams (PPGs) and a single speaker WaveNet vocoder conditioned on mel spectrograms. To enhance the converted speech quality, and to overcome over-smoothing, the outputs of Tacotron are passed through a novel speechenhancem…
Here we present a novel approach to conditioning the SampleRNN generative model for voice conversion (VC). Conventional methods for VC modify the perceived speaker identity by converting between source and target acoustic features. Our approach focuses on preserving voice content and depends on the generative network to learn voice style. We first train a multi-speaker SampleRNN model conditioned on linguistic features, pitch contour, and speaker identity using a multi-speaker speech corpus. Voice-converted speech is generated using linguistic features and pitch contour extracted from the sour…
Voice conversion (VC) refers to transforming the speaker characteristics of an utterance without altering its linguistic contents. Many works on voice conversion require to have parallel training data that is highly expensive to acquire. Recently, the cycle-consistent adversarial network (CycleGAN), which does not require parallel training data, has been applied to voice conversion, showing the state-of-the-art performance. The CycleGAN based voice conversion, however, can be used only for a pair of speakers, i.e., one-to-one voice conversion between two speakers. In this paper, we extend the …
Recently, voice conversion (VC) without parallel data has been successfully adapted to multi-target scenario in which a single model is trained to convert the input voice to many different speakers. However, such model suffers from the limitation that it can only convert the voice to the speakers in the training data, which narrows down the applicable scenario of VC. In this paper, we proposed a novel one-shot VC approach which is able to perform VC by only an example utterance from source and target speaker respectively, and the source and target speaker do not even need to be seen during tra…
