Sequence-to-Sequence Acoustic Modeling for Voice Conversion

• Published in: IEEE/ACM transactions on audio, speech, and language processing Vol. 27; no. 3; pp. 631 - 644
• Main Authors: Zhang, Jing-Xuan, Ling, Zhen-Hua, Liu, Li-Juan, Jiang, Yuan, Dai, Li-Rong
• Format: Journal Article
• Language: English
• Published: Piscataway IEEE 01.03.2019; The Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers, Inc. (IEEE)
• Subjects: Ablation; Acoustics; Artificial neural networks; attention; Automatic speech recognition; Cloning; Conditioning; Conversion; Decoding; Feature extraction; Linguistics; Mel-spectrogram; Modelling; Neural networks; Probabilistic models; sequence-to-sequence; Spectrograms; Speech processing; Speech recognition; Vocal tract; Vocoders; Voice conversion; Voice recognition; Waveforms
• ISSN: 2329-9290; 2329-9304
• DOI: 10.1109/TASLP.2019.2892235

In this paper, a neural network named sequence-to-sequence ConvErsion NeTwork (SCENT) is presented for acoustic modeling in voice conversion. At training stage, a SCENT model is estimated by aligning the feature sequences of source and target speakers implicitly using attention mechanism. At the conversion stage, acoustic features and durations of source utterances are converted simultaneously using the unified acoustic model. Mel-scale spectrograms are adopted as acoustic features, which contain both excitation and vocal tract descriptions of speech signals. The bottleneck features extracted from source speech using an automatic speech recognition model are appended as an auxiliary input. A WaveNet vocoder conditioned on Mel-spectrograms is built to reconstruct waveforms from the outputs of the SCENT model. It is worth noting that our proposed method can achieve appropriate duration conversion, which is difficult in conventional methods. Experimental results show that our proposed method obtained better objective and subjective performance than the baseline methods using Gaussian mixture models and deep neural networks as acoustic models. This proposed method also outperformed our previous work, which achieved the top rank in Voice Conversion Challenge 2018. Ablation tests further confirmed the effectiveness of several components in our proposed method.