DNN-based Speaker Embedding Using Subjective Inter-speaker Similarity for Multi-speaker Modeling in Speech Synthesis

This paper proposes novel algorithms for speaker embedding using subjective inter-speaker similarity based on deep neural networks (DNNs). Although conventional DNN-based speaker embedding such as a $d$-vector can be applied to multi-speaker modeling in speech synthesis, it does not correlate with the subjective inter-speaker similarity and is not necessarily appropriate speaker representation for open speakers whose speech utterances are not included in the training data. We propose two training algorithms for DNN-based speaker embedding model using an inter-speaker similarity matrix obtained by large-scale subjective scoring. One is based on similarity vector embedding and trains the model to predict a vector of the similarity matrix as speaker representation. The other is based on similarity matrix embedding and trains the model to minimize the squared Frobenius norm between the similarity matrix and the Gram matrix of $d$-vectors, i.e., the inter-speaker similarity derived from the $d$-vectors. We crowdsourced the inter-speaker similarity scores of 153 Japanese female speakers, and the experimental results demonstrate that our algorithms learn speaker embedding that is highly correlated with the subjective similarity. We also apply the proposed speaker embedding to multi-speaker modeling in DNN-based speech synthesis and reveal that the proposed similarity vector embedding improves synthetic speech quality for open speakers whose speech utterances are unseen during the training.Comment: 6 pages, 7 figures, accepted for The 10th ISCA Speech Synthesis Workshop (SSW10

JVS-MuSiC: Japanese multispeaker singing-voice corpus

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 also includes another song that is different for each singer. In this paper, we describe the design of the corpus and experimental analyses using JVS-MuSiC. We investigated the relationship between 1) the similarity of singing voices and perceptual oneness of unison singing voices and between 2) the similarity of singing voices and that of speech. The results suggest that 1) there is a positive and moderate correlation between singing-voice similarity and the oneness of unison and that 2) the correlation between singing-voice similarity and speech similarity is weak. This corpus is freely available online