Eun-Woo Song

We propose Parallel WaveGAN, a distillation-free, fast, and small-footprint waveform generation method using a generative adversarial network. In the proposed method, a non-autoregressive WaveNet is trained by jointly optimizing multi-resolution spectrogram and adversarial loss functions, which can effectively capture the time-frequency distribution of the realistic speech waveform. As our method does not require density distillation used in the conventional teacher-student framework, the entire

In this paper, we report research results on modeling the parameters of an improved time-frequency trajectory excitation (ITFTE) and spectral envelopes of an LPC vocoder with a long short-term memory (LSTM)-based recurrent neural network (RNN) for high-quality text-to-speech (TTS) systems. The ITFTE vocoder has been shown to significantly improve the perceptual quality of statistical parameter-based TTS systems in our prior works. However, a simple feed-forward deep neural network (DNN) with a f

This paper proposes a WaveNet-based neural excitation model (ExcitNet) for statistical parametric speech synthesis systems. Conventional WaveNet-based neural vocoding systems significantly improve the perceptual quality of synthesized speech by statistically generating a time sequence of speech waveforms through an auto-regressive framework. However, they often suffer from noisy outputs because of the difficulties in capturing the complicated time-varying nature of speech signals. To improve mod

This paper proposes a spectral-domain perceptual weighting technique for Parallel WaveGAN-based text-to-speech (TTS) systems. The recently proposed Parallel WaveGAN vocoder successfully generates waveform sequences using a fast non-autoregressive WaveNet model. By employing multi-resolution short-time Fourier transform (MR-STFT) criteria with a generative adversarial network, the light-weight convolutional networks can be effectively trained without any distillation process. To further improve t

This paper proposes an improved time-frequency trajectory excitation (TFTE) modeling method for a statistical parametric speech synthesis system. The proposed approach overcomes the dimensional variation problem of the training process caused by the inherent nature of the pitch-dependent analysis paradigm. By reducing the redundancies of the parameters using predicted average block coefficients (PABC), the proposed algorithm efficiently models excitation, even if its dimension is varied. Objecti

This paper proposes a modeling-by-generation (MbG) excitation vocoder for a neural text-to-speech (TTS) system. Recently proposed neural excitation vocoders can realize qualified waveform generation by combining a vocal tract filter with a WaveNet-based glottal excitation generator. However, when these vocoders are used in a TTS system, the quality of synthesized speech is often degraded owing to a mismatch between training and synthesis steps. Specifically, the vocoder is separately trained fro

Recent advances in synthetic speech quality have enabled us to train text-to-speech (TTS) systems by using synthetic corpora. However, merely increasing the amount of synthetic data is not always advantageous for improving training efficiency. Our aim in this study is to selectively choose synthetic data that are beneficial to the training process. In the proposed method, we first adopt a variational autoencoder whose posterior distribution is utilized to extract latent features representing aco

This paper proposes a spectral-domain perceptual weighting technique for Parallel WaveGAN-based text-to-speech (TTS) systems. The recently proposed Parallel WaveGAN vocoder successfully generates waveform sequences using a fast non-autoregressive WaveNet model. By employing multi-resolution short-time Fourier transform (MR-STFT) criteria with a generative adversarial network, the light-weight convolutional networks can be effectively trained without any distillation process. To further improve t

This paper proposes speaker-adaptive neural vocoders for parametric text-to-speech (TTS) systems. Recently proposed WaveNet-based neural vocoding systems successfully generate a time sequence of speech signal with an autoregressive framework. However, it remains a challenge to synthesize high-quality speech when the amount of a target speaker's training data is insufficient. To generate more natural speech signals with the constraint of limited training data, we propose a speaker adaptation task

This paper proposes a spectral-domain perceptual weighting technique for Parallel WaveGAN-based text-to-speech (TTS) systems. The recently proposed Parallel WaveGAN vocoder successfully generates waveform sequences using a fast non-autoregressive WaveNet model. By employing multi-resolution short-time Fourier transform (MR-STFT) criteria with a generative adversarial network, the light-weight convolutional networks can be effectively trained without any distillation process. To further improve t

This paper investigates how the perceptual quality of the synthesized speech is affected by reconstruction errors in excitation signals generated by a deep learning-based statistical model. In this framework, the excitation signal obtained by an LPC inverse filter is first decomposed into harmonic and noise components using an improved time-frequency trajectory excitation (ITFTE) scheme, then they are trained and generated by a deep long short-term memory (DLSTM)-based speech synthesis system. B

This paper proposes a WaveNet-based neural excitation model (ExcitNet) for statistical parametric speech synthesis systems. Conventional WaveNet-based neural vocoding systems significantly improve the perceptual quality of synthesized speech by statistically generating a time sequence of speech waveforms through an auto-regressive framework. However, they often suffer from noisy outputs because of the difficulties in capturing the complicated time-varying nature of speech signals. To improve mod

This paper proposes a multi-class learning (MCL) algorithm for a deep neural network (DNN)-based statistical parametric speech synthesis (SPSS) system. Although the DNN-based SPSS system improves the modeling accuracy of statistical parameters, its synthesized speech is often muffled because the training process only considers the global characteristics of the entire set of training data, but does not explicitly consider any local variations. We introduce a DNN-based context clustering algorithm