EMOCONV-DIFF: Diffusion-based Speech Emotion Conversion for Non-parallel and In-the-wild Data

Fuente: arXiv
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Autori principali: Prabhu, Navin Raj, Lay, Bunlong, Welker, Simon, Lehmann-Willenbrock, Nale, Gerkmann, Timo
Natura: Preprint
Pubblicazione: 2023
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author Prabhu, Navin Raj
Lay, Bunlong
Welker, Simon
Lehmann-Willenbrock, Nale
Gerkmann, Timo
author_facet Prabhu, Navin Raj
Lay, Bunlong
Welker, Simon
Lehmann-Willenbrock, Nale
Gerkmann, Timo
contents Speech emotion conversion is the task of converting the expressed emotion of a spoken utterance to a target emotion while preserving the lexical content and speaker identity. While most existing works in speech emotion conversion rely on acted-out datasets and parallel data samples, in this work we specifically focus on more challenging in-the-wild scenarios and do not rely on parallel data. To this end, we propose a diffusion-based generative model for speech emotion conversion, the EmoConv-Diff, that is trained to reconstruct an input utterance while also conditioning on its emotion. Subsequently, at inference, a target emotion embedding is employed to convert the emotion of the input utterance to the given target emotion. As opposed to performing emotion conversion on categorical representations, we use a continuous arousal dimension to represent emotions while also achieving intensity control. We validate the proposed methodology on a large in-the-wild dataset, the MSP-Podcast v1.10. Our results show that the proposed diffusion model is indeed capable of synthesizing speech with a controllable target emotion. Crucially, the proposed approach shows improved performance along the extreme values of arousal and thereby addresses a common challenge in the speech emotion conversion literature.
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publishDate 2023
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spellingShingle EMOCONV-DIFF: Diffusion-based Speech Emotion Conversion for Non-parallel and In-the-wild Data
Prabhu, Navin Raj
Lay, Bunlong
Welker, Simon
Lehmann-Willenbrock, Nale
Gerkmann, Timo
Audio and Speech Processing
Sound
Signal Processing
Speech emotion conversion is the task of converting the expressed emotion of a spoken utterance to a target emotion while preserving the lexical content and speaker identity. While most existing works in speech emotion conversion rely on acted-out datasets and parallel data samples, in this work we specifically focus on more challenging in-the-wild scenarios and do not rely on parallel data. To this end, we propose a diffusion-based generative model for speech emotion conversion, the EmoConv-Diff, that is trained to reconstruct an input utterance while also conditioning on its emotion. Subsequently, at inference, a target emotion embedding is employed to convert the emotion of the input utterance to the given target emotion. As opposed to performing emotion conversion on categorical representations, we use a continuous arousal dimension to represent emotions while also achieving intensity control. We validate the proposed methodology on a large in-the-wild dataset, the MSP-Podcast v1.10. Our results show that the proposed diffusion model is indeed capable of synthesizing speech with a controllable target emotion. Crucially, the proposed approach shows improved performance along the extreme values of arousal and thereby addresses a common challenge in the speech emotion conversion literature.
title EMOCONV-DIFF: Diffusion-based Speech Emotion Conversion for Non-parallel and In-the-wild Data
topic Audio and Speech Processing
Sound
Signal Processing
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2309.07828