2024/05/01 by Yimin Deng, Deng, Yimin, Jianzong Wang +7 · 1 citation
Computer Science · #Audio and Speech Processing (eess.AS) #FOS: Computer and information sciences #FOS: Electrical engineering #Sound (cs.SD) #Speech Recognition and Synthesis #Speech and Audio Processing #electronic engineering #information engineering
paper · pdf · doi:10.48550/arxiv.2405.00603
openalex publication_date 2024/05/01 · openalex created_date 2025/10/10 · openalex updated_date 2026/07/28
Voice conversion is the task to transform voice characteristics of source speech while preserving content information. Nowadays, self-supervised representation learning models are increasingly utilized in content extraction. However, in these representations, a lot of hidden speaker information leads to timbre leakage while the prosodic information of hidden units lacks use. To address these issues, we propose a novel framework for expressive voice conversion called "SAVC" based on soft speech units from HuBert-soft. Taking soft speech units as input, we design an attribute encoder to extract content and prosody features respectively. Specifically, we first introduce statistic perturbation imposed by adversarial style augmentation to eliminate speaker information. Then the prosody is implicitly modeled on soft speech units with knowledge distillation. Experiment results show that the intelligibility and naturalness of converted speech outperform previous work.