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

Kaizhi Qian, Zeyu Jin, Mark Hasegawa-Johnson, Gautham J. Mysore

Research output: Chapter in Book/Report/Conference proceedingConference contribution

Abstract

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 speaker identity is disentangled from speech content, a significant amount of prosodic information, such as source F0, leaks through the bottleneck, causing target F0 to fluctuate unnaturally. Furthermore, AUTOVC has no control of the converted F0 and thus unsuitable for many applications. In the paper, we modified and improved autoencoder-based voice conversion to disentangle content, F0, and speaker identity at the same time. Therefore, we can control the F0 contour, generate speech with F0 consistent with the target speaker, and significantly improve quality and similarity. We support our improvement through quantitative and qualitative analysis.

Original languageEnglish (US)
Title of host publication2020 IEEE International Conference on Acoustics, Speech, and Signal Processing, ICASSP 2020 - Proceedings
PublisherInstitute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers Inc.
Pages6284-6288
Number of pages5
ISBN (Electronic)9781509066315
DOIs
StatePublished - May 2020
Event2020 IEEE International Conference on Acoustics, Speech, and Signal Processing, ICASSP 2020 - Barcelona, Spain
Duration: May 4 2020May 8 2020

Publication series

NameICASSP, IEEE International Conference on Acoustics, Speech and Signal Processing - Proceedings
Volume2020-May
ISSN (Print)1520-6149

Conference

Conference2020 IEEE International Conference on Acoustics, Speech, and Signal Processing, ICASSP 2020
Country/TerritorySpain
CityBarcelona
Period5/4/205/8/20

Keywords

  • Autoencoder
  • F0-conversion
  • Voice-conversion
  • WaveNet-vocoder

ASJC Scopus subject areas

  • Software
  • Signal Processing
  • Electrical and Electronic Engineering

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