15 accepted papers
Automatic detection of synthetic speech is becoming increasingly important as current synthesis methods are both near indistinguishable from human speech and widely accessible to the public. Audio watermarking and other active disclosure methods of are attracting research activity, as they can compl…
This paper introduces Open-Amp, a synthetic data framework for generating large-scale and diverse audio effects data. Audio effects are relevant to many musical audio processing and Music Information Retrieval (MIR) tasks, such as modelling of analog audio effects, automatic mixing, tone matching an…
Advances in neural speech synthesis have brought us technology that is not only close to human naturalness, but is also capable of instant voice cloning with little data, and is highly accessible with pre-trained models available. Naturally, the potential flood of generated content raises the need f…
We propose an audio effects processing framework that learns to emulate a target electric guitar tone from a recording. We train a deep neural network using an adversarial approach, with the goal of trans-forming the timbre of a guitar, into the timbre of another guitar after audio effects processin…
This paper describes a data-driven approach to creating real-time neural network models of guitar amplifiers, recreating the amplifiers’ sonic response to arbitrary inputs at the full range of controls present on the physical device. While the focus on the paper is on the data collection pipeline, w…
Recent neural waveform synthesizers such as WaveNet, WaveG-low, and the neural-source-filter (NSF) model have shown good performance in speech synthesis despite their different methods of waveform generation. The similarity between speech and music audio synthesis techniques suggests interesting ave…
Speaking style conversion (SSC) is the technology of converting natural speech signals from one style to another. In this study, we propose the use of cycle-consistent adversarial networks (CycleGANs) for converting styles with varying vocal effort, and focus on conversion between normal and Lombard…
This study explores various speech data augmentation methods for the task of noise-robust fundamental frequency (F0) estimation with neural networks. The explored augmentation strategies are split into additive noise and channel-based augmentation and into vocoder-based augmentation methods. In voco…
Analog audio effects and synthesizers often owe their distinct sound to circuit nonlinearities. Faithfully modeling such significant aspect of the original sound in virtual analog software can prove challenging. The current work proposes a generic data-driven approach to virtual analog modeling and…
The state-of-the-art in text-to-speech (TTS) synthesis has recently improved considerably due to novel neural waveform generation methods, such as WaveNet. However, these methods suffer from their slow sequential inference process, while their parallel versions are difficult to train and even more c…
Recent advances in speech synthesis suggest that limitations such as the lossy nature of the amplitude spectrum with minimum phase approximation and the over-smoothing effect in acoustic modeling can be overcome by using advanced machine learning approaches. In this paper, we build a framework in wh…
This paper proposes a method for generating speech from filterbank mel frequency cepstral coefficients (MFCC), which are widely used in speech applications, such as ASR, but are generally considered unusable for speech synthesis. First, we predict fundamental frequency and voicing information from M…
Text-independent speaker verification (recognizing speakers regardless of content) and non-parallel voice conversion (transforming voice identities without requiring content-matched training utterances) are related problems. We adopt i-vector method to voice conversion. An i-vector is a fixed-dimens…
Speaker recognition performance degrades substantially in case of vocal effort mismatch (e.g. shouted vs. normal speech) between test and enrollment utterances. Such a mismatch is often encountered, for example, in forensic speaker recognition. This paper introduces a novel spectral mapping method w…
Achieving high quality and naturalness in statistical parametric synthesis of female voices remains to be difficult despite recent advances in the study area. Vocoding is one such key element in all statistical speech synthesizers that is known to affect the synthesis quality and naturalness. The pr…