Discrete Unit based Masking for Improving Disentanglement in Voice Conversion

Fuente: arXiv
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Hauptverfasser: Lee, Philip H., Ulgen, Ismail Rasim, Sisman, Berrak
Format: Preprint
Veröffentlicht: 2024
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author Lee, Philip H.
Ulgen, Ismail Rasim
Sisman, Berrak
author_facet Lee, Philip H.
Ulgen, Ismail Rasim
Sisman, Berrak
contents Voice conversion (VC) aims to modify the speaker's identity while preserving the linguistic content. Commonly, VC methods use an encoder-decoder architecture, where disentangling the speaker's identity from linguistic information is crucial. However, the disentanglement approaches used in these methods are limited as the speaker features depend on the phonetic content of the utterance, compromising disentanglement. This dependency is amplified with attention-based methods. To address this, we introduce a novel masking mechanism in the input before speaker encoding, masking certain discrete speech units that correspond highly with phoneme classes. Our work aims to reduce the phonetic dependency of speaker features by restricting access to some phonetic information. Furthermore, since our approach is at the input level, it is applicable to any encoder-decoder based VC framework. Our approach improves disentanglement and conversion performance across multiple VC methods, showing significant effectiveness, particularly in attention-based method, with 44% relative improvement in objective intelligibility.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2409_11560
institution arXiv
publishDate 2024
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle Discrete Unit based Masking for Improving Disentanglement in Voice Conversion
Lee, Philip H.
Ulgen, Ismail Rasim
Sisman, Berrak
Audio and Speech Processing
Machine Learning
Sound
Voice conversion (VC) aims to modify the speaker's identity while preserving the linguistic content. Commonly, VC methods use an encoder-decoder architecture, where disentangling the speaker's identity from linguistic information is crucial. However, the disentanglement approaches used in these methods are limited as the speaker features depend on the phonetic content of the utterance, compromising disentanglement. This dependency is amplified with attention-based methods. To address this, we introduce a novel masking mechanism in the input before speaker encoding, masking certain discrete speech units that correspond highly with phoneme classes. Our work aims to reduce the phonetic dependency of speaker features by restricting access to some phonetic information. Furthermore, since our approach is at the input level, it is applicable to any encoder-decoder based VC framework. Our approach improves disentanglement and conversion performance across multiple VC methods, showing significant effectiveness, particularly in attention-based method, with 44% relative improvement in objective intelligibility.
title Discrete Unit based Masking for Improving Disentanglement in Voice Conversion
topic Audio and Speech Processing
Machine Learning
Sound
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2409.11560