SNAC: Speaker-normalized affine coupling layer in flow-based architecture for zero-shot multi-speaker text-to-speech

Zero-shot multi-speaker text-to-speech (ZSM-TTS) models aim to generate a speech sample with the voice characteristic of an unseen speaker. The main challenge of ZSM-TTS is to increase the overall speaker similarity for unseen speakers. One of the most successful speaker conditioning methods for flow-based multi-speaker text-to-speech (TTS) models is to utilize the functions which predict the scale and bias parameters of the affine coupling layers according to the given speaker embedding vector. In this letter, we improve on the previous speaker conditioning method by introducing a speaker-normalized affine coupling (SNAC) layer which allows for unseen speaker speech synthesis in a zero-shot manner leveraging a normalization-based conditioning technique. The newly designed coupling layer explicitly normalizes the input by the parameters predicted from a speaker embedding vector while training, enabling an inverse process of denormalizing for a new speaker embedding at inference. The proposed conditioning scheme yields the state-of-the-art performance in terms of the speech quality and speaker similarity in a ZSM-TTS setting.Comment: Accepted to IEEE Signal Processing Letter

Mathematical vibration modeling for an electrostatic precipitator system

The rapping acceleration of collecting plates in electrostatic precipitator system determines the dust- rapping performance of electromagnetic vibration exciter. To maximize the acceleration, the resonance phenomena needs to be driven by matching the mechanical natural frequency of the electrostatic precipitator system and the input frequency of electric current which energizes the electromagnetic vibrator. In this paper, the dust collecting plates and the electromagnetic vibration exciter in electrostatic precipitator system are vibration-modeled mathematically to characterize the resonance frequency. The effective mass and stiffness for each mode of the collecting plates are calculated using finite elements analysis and the natural frequency are computed by the method of least error square. In addition, the effective mass and stiffness of the exciter are computed. Then, the whole electrostatic precipitator system is analyzed. A frequency response analysis based on a sine sweep signal experiment is performed on a prototype for verification of calculated theoretical resonance frequency