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An Improved StarGAN for Emotional Voice Conversion: Enhancing Voice Quality and Data Augmentation

2021/07/18 by Xiangheng He, He, Xiangheng, Junjie Chen +5
Computer Science · #Artificial Intelligence (cs.AI) #Audio and Speech Processing (eess.AS) #FOS: Computer and information sciences #FOS: Electrical engineering #Music and Audio Processing #Sound (cs.SD) #Speech Recognition and Synthesis #Speech and Audio Processing #electronic engineering #information engineering

paper · pdf · doi:10.48550/arxiv.2107.08361

openalex publication_date 2021/07/18 · openalex created_date 2021/08/02 · openalex updated_date 2026/07/28

Abstract

Emotional Voice Conversion (EVC) aims to convert the emotional style of a source speech signal to a target style while preserving its content and speaker identity information. Previous emotional conversion studies do not disentangle emotional information from emotion-independent information that should be preserved, thus transforming it all in a monolithic manner and generating audio of low quality, with linguistic distortions. To address this distortion problem, we propose a novel StarGAN framework along with a two-stage training process that separates emotional features from those independent of emotion by using an autoencoder with two encoders as the generator of the Generative Adversarial Network (GAN). The proposed model achieves favourable results in both the objective evaluation and the subjective evaluation in terms of distortion, which reveals that the proposed model can effectively reduce distortion. Furthermore, in data augmentation experiments for end-to-end speech emotion recognition, the proposed StarGAN model achieves an increase of 2% in Micro-F1 and 5% in Macro-F1 compared to the baseline StarGAN model, which indicates that the proposed model is more valuable for data augmentation.

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