This paper introduces a deep neural network model for subband-based speech
synthesizer. The model benefits from the short bandwidth of the subband signals
to reduce the complexity of the time-domain speech generator. We employed the
multi-level wavelet analysis/synthesis to decompose/reconstruct the signal into
subbands in time domain. Inspired from the WaveNet, a convolutional neural
network (CNN) model predicts subband speech signals fully in time domain. Due
to the short bandwidth of the subbands, a simple network architecture is enough
to train the simple patterns of the subbands accurately. In the ground truth
experiments with teacher-forcing, the subband synthesizer outperforms the
fullband model significantly in terms of both subjective and objective
measures. In addition, by conditioning the model on the phoneme sequence using
a pronunciation dictionary, we have achieved the fully time-domain neural model
for subband-based text-to-speech (TTS) synthesizer, which is nearly end-to-end.
The generated speech of the subband TTS shows comparable quality as the
fullband one with a slighter network architecture for each subband.Comment: 5 pages, 3 figur