SNR-Based Teachers-Student Technique for Speech Enhancement

It is very challenging for speech enhancement methods to achieves robust performance under both high signal-to-noise ratio (SNR) and low SNR simultaneously. In this paper, we propose a method that integrates an SNR-based teachers-student technique and time-domain U-Net to deal with this problem. Specifically, this method consists of multiple teacher models and a student model. We first train the teacher models under multiple small-range SNRs that do not coincide with each other so that they can perform speech enhancement well within the specific SNR range. Then, we choose different teacher models to supervise the training of the student model according to the SNR of the training data. Eventually, the student model can perform speech enhancement under both high SNR and low SNR. To evaluate the proposed method, we constructed a dataset with an SNR ranging from -20dB to 20dB based on the public dataset. We experimentally analyzed the effectiveness of the SNR-based teachers-student technique and compared the proposed method with several state-of-the-art methods.Comment: Published in 2020 IEEE International Conference on Multimedia and Expo (ICME 2020

The Effect of Explicit Structure Encoding of Deep Neural Networks for Symbolic Music Generation

With recent breakthroughs in artificial neural networks, deep generative models have become one of the leading techniques for computational creativity. Despite very promising progress on image and short sequence generation, symbolic music generation remains a challenging problem since the structure of compositions are usually complicated. In this study, we attempt to solve the melody generation problem constrained by the given chord progression. This music meta-creation problem can also be incorporated into a plan recognition system with user inputs and predictive structural outputs. In particular, we explore the effect of explicit architectural encoding of musical structure via comparing two sequential generative models: LSTM (a type of RNN) and WaveNet (dilated temporal-CNN). As far as we know, this is the first study of applying WaveNet to symbolic music generation, as well as the first systematic comparison between temporal-CNN and RNN for music generation. We conduct a survey for evaluation in our generations and implemented Variable Markov Oracle in music pattern discovery. Experimental results show that to encode structure more explicitly using a stack of dilated convolution layers improved the performance significantly, and a global encoding of underlying chord progression into the generation procedure gains even more.Comment: 8 pages, 13 figure

RawNet: Fast End-to-End Neural Vocoder

Neural networks based vocoders have recently demonstrated the powerful ability to synthesize high quality speech. These models usually generate samples by conditioning on some spectrum features, such as Mel-spectrum. However, these features are extracted by using speech analysis module including some processing based on the human knowledge. In this work, we proposed RawNet, a truly end-to-end neural vocoder, which use a coder network to learn the higher representation of signal, and an autoregressive voder network to generate speech sample by sample. The coder and voder together act like an auto-encoder network, and could be jointly trained directly on raw waveform without any human-designed features. The experiments on the Copy-Synthesis tasks show that RawNet can achieve the comparative synthesized speech quality with LPCNet, with a smaller model architecture and faster speech generation at the inference step.Comment: Submitted to Interspeech 2019, Graz, Austri