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Main Authors: Bargum, Anders R., Lajboschitz, Simon, Erkut, Cumhur
Format: Preprint
Published: 2024
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Online Access:https://arxiv.org/abs/2408.16546
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author Bargum, Anders R.
Lajboschitz, Simon
Erkut, Cumhur
author_facet Bargum, Anders R.
Lajboschitz, Simon
Erkut, Cumhur
contents Voice conversion has gained increasing popularity within the field of audio manipulation and speech synthesis. Often, the main objective is to transfer the input identity to that of a target speaker without changing its linguistic content. While current work provides high-fidelity solutions they rarely focus on model simplicity, high-sampling rate environments or stream-ability. By incorporating speech representation learning into a generative timbre transfer model, traditionally created for musical purposes, we investigate the realm of voice conversion generated directly in the time domain at high sampling rates. More specifically, we guide the latent space of a baseline model towards linguistically relevant representations and condition it on external speaker information. Through objective and subjective assessments, we demonstrate that the proposed solution can attain levels of naturalness, quality, and intelligibility comparable to those of a state-of-the-art solution for seen speakers, while significantly decreasing inference time. However, despite the presence of target speaker characteristics in the converted output, the actual similarity to unseen speakers remains a challenge.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2408_16546
institution arXiv
publishDate 2024
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle RAVE for Speech: Efficient Voice Conversion at High Sampling Rates
Bargum, Anders R.
Lajboschitz, Simon
Erkut, Cumhur
Sound
Audio and Speech Processing
Voice conversion has gained increasing popularity within the field of audio manipulation and speech synthesis. Often, the main objective is to transfer the input identity to that of a target speaker without changing its linguistic content. While current work provides high-fidelity solutions they rarely focus on model simplicity, high-sampling rate environments or stream-ability. By incorporating speech representation learning into a generative timbre transfer model, traditionally created for musical purposes, we investigate the realm of voice conversion generated directly in the time domain at high sampling rates. More specifically, we guide the latent space of a baseline model towards linguistically relevant representations and condition it on external speaker information. Through objective and subjective assessments, we demonstrate that the proposed solution can attain levels of naturalness, quality, and intelligibility comparable to those of a state-of-the-art solution for seen speakers, while significantly decreasing inference time. However, despite the presence of target speaker characteristics in the converted output, the actual similarity to unseen speakers remains a challenge.
title RAVE for Speech: Efficient Voice Conversion at High Sampling Rates
topic Sound
Audio and Speech Processing
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2408.16546