546 research outputs found

    Reimagining Speech: A Scoping Review of Deep Learning-Powered Voice Conversion

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    Research on deep learning-powered voice conversion (VC) in speech-to-speech scenarios is getting increasingly popular. Although many of the works in the field of voice conversion share a common global pipeline, there is a considerable diversity in the underlying structures, methods, and neural sub-blocks used across research efforts. Thus, obtaining a comprehensive understanding of the reasons behind the choice of the different methods in the voice conversion pipeline can be challenging, and the actual hurdles in the proposed solutions are often unclear. To shed light on these aspects, this paper presents a scoping review that explores the use of deep learning in speech analysis, synthesis, and disentangled speech representation learning within modern voice conversion systems. We screened 621 publications from more than 38 different venues between the years 2017 and 2023, followed by an in-depth review of a final database consisting of 123 eligible studies. Based on the review, we summarise the most frequently used approaches to voice conversion based on deep learning and highlight common pitfalls within the community. Lastly, we condense the knowledge gathered, identify main challenges and provide recommendations for future research directions

    AffectEcho: Speaker Independent and Language-Agnostic Emotion and Affect Transfer for Speech Synthesis

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    Affect is an emotional characteristic encompassing valence, arousal, and intensity, and is a crucial attribute for enabling authentic conversations. While existing text-to-speech (TTS) and speech-to-speech systems rely on strength embedding vectors and global style tokens to capture emotions, these models represent emotions as a component of style or represent them in discrete categories. We propose AffectEcho, an emotion translation model, that uses a Vector Quantized codebook to model emotions within a quantized space featuring five levels of affect intensity to capture complex nuances and subtle differences in the same emotion. The quantized emotional embeddings are implicitly derived from spoken speech samples, eliminating the need for one-hot vectors or explicit strength embeddings. Experimental results demonstrate the effectiveness of our approach in controlling the emotions of generated speech while preserving identity, style, and emotional cadence unique to each speaker. We showcase the language-independent emotion modeling capability of the quantized emotional embeddings learned from a bilingual (English and Chinese) speech corpus with an emotion transfer task from a reference speech to a target speech. We achieve state-of-art results on both qualitative and quantitative metrics

    Voice Conversion

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    Cross-Lingual Voice Conversion with Non-Parallel Data

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    In this project a Phonetic Posteriorgram (PPG) based Voice Conversion system is implemented. The main goal is to perform and evaluate conversions of singing voice. The cross-gender and cross-lingual scenarios are considered. Additionally, the use of spectral envelope based MFCC and pseudo-singing dataset for ASR training are proposed in order to improve the performance of the system in the singing context

    Make-A-Voice: Unified Voice Synthesis With Discrete Representation

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    Various applications of voice synthesis have been developed independently despite the fact that they generate "voice" as output in common. In addition, the majority of voice synthesis models currently rely on annotated audio data, but it is crucial to scale them to self-supervised datasets in order to effectively capture the wide range of acoustic variations present in human voice, including speaker identity, emotion, and prosody. In this work, we propose Make-A-Voice, a unified framework for synthesizing and manipulating voice signals from discrete representations. Make-A-Voice leverages a "coarse-to-fine" approach to model the human voice, which involves three stages: 1) semantic stage: model high-level transformation between linguistic content and self-supervised semantic tokens, 2) acoustic stage: introduce varying control signals as acoustic conditions for semantic-to-acoustic modeling, and 3) generation stage: synthesize high-fidelity waveforms from acoustic tokens. Make-A-Voice offers notable benefits as a unified voice synthesis framework: 1) Data scalability: the major backbone (i.e., acoustic and generation stage) does not require any annotations, and thus the training data could be scaled up. 2) Controllability and conditioning flexibility: we investigate different conditioning mechanisms and effectively handle three voice synthesis applications, including text-to-speech (TTS), voice conversion (VC), and singing voice synthesis (SVS) by re-synthesizing the discrete voice representations with prompt guidance. Experimental results demonstrate that Make-A-Voice exhibits superior audio quality and style similarity compared with competitive baseline models. Audio samples are available at https://Make-A-Voice.github.i

    Speech Synthesis Based on Hidden Markov Models

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