Voicing-Aware Parallel WaveGAN for High-Quality Speech Synthesis

Submitted to IEEE signal processing letters

• Authors
• Abstract
• TTS samples
  • M1 (male)
  • M2 (male)
  • F1 (female)
  • F2 (female)
• Acknowledgements

Authors

• Ryuichi Yamamoto (LINE Corp.)
• Min-Jae Hwang (Search Solutions Inc.)
• Eunwoo Song (NAVER Corp.)

Abstract

This letter proposes a voicing-aware Parallel Wave- GAN (VA-PWG) vocoder for a neural text-to-speech (TTS) system. To generate a high-quality speech waveform, it is important to reflect the distinct characteristics of voiced and unvoiced speech signals well. However, it is difficult for the conventional PWG model to accurately represent this condition, since the single unified architectures of the generator and discriminator are insufficient to capture those characteristics. In the proposed method, both the generator and discriminator are divided into their subnetworks to individually model the voicing state-dependent characteristics of a speech signal. In particular, a VA-generator consisting of two sub-WaveNets generates the harmonic and noise components of a speech signal by inputting pitch-dependent sine wave and Gaussian noise sources, respectively. Likewise, a VA-discriminator consisting of two sub-discriminators learns the distinct characteristics of harmonic and noise components by feeding the voiced and unvoiced waveforms, respectively. Subjective evaluation results verified the effectiveness of the proposed VA-PWG vocoder by achieving a 4.25 mean opinion score from a speaker-independent training scenario that was 11% higher than that of a conventional PWG vocoder.

TTS samples

M1 (male)

Sample 1: “鹿児島県で最大震度三を観測しています。”

Sample 2: “葉加瀬太郎の情熱大陸です。”

Sample 3: “それでうちの部は半分に減らされる。”

M2 (male)

Sample 1: “ヨメの、レオンティーンさんですね。”

Sample 2: “御予約は、二泊三日ですね。”

Sample 3: “わたさちの、ローリーさんですね。”

F1 (female)

Sample 1: “かわいそうに、助けてやらなくてはと、家に連れて帰りましたとさ。”

Sample 2: “失礼のないよう、笑顔で挨拶して。”

Sample 3: “照れていたので、ちょっと意外な気がしましたー。”

F2 (female)

Sample 1: “そして目に留まったのは、お気に入りの居酒屋の前にあるゴミの山。”

Sample 2: “今ひとつ、時間が足りず。”

Sample 3: “実はこの道の先に、高い山があってね。”

Acknowledgements

Work performed with nVoice, Clova Voice, Naver Corp.