Paper ID | AUD-33.3 | ||
Paper Title | SEEN AND UNSEEN EMOTIONAL STYLE TRANSFER FOR VOICE CONVERSION WITH A NEW EMOTIONAL SPEECH DATASET | ||
Authors | Kun Zhou, National University of Singapore, Singapore; Berrak Sisman, Rui Liu, Singapore University of Technology and Design, Singapore; Haizhou Li, National University of Singapore, Singapore | ||
Session | AUD-33: Topics in Deep Learning for Speech and Audio | ||
Location | Gather.Town | ||
Session Time: | Friday, 11 June, 14:00 - 14:45 | ||
Presentation Time: | Friday, 11 June, 14:00 - 14:45 | ||
Presentation | Poster | ||
Topic | Audio and Acoustic Signal Processing: [AUD-AMCT] Audio and Speech Modeling, Coding and Transmission | ||
IEEE Xplore Open Preview | Click here to view in IEEE Xplore | ||
Abstract | Emotional voice conversion aims to transform emotional prosody in speech while preserving the linguistic content and speaker identity. Prior studies show that it is possible to disentangle emotional prosody using an encoder-decoder network conditioned on discrete representation, such as one-hot emotion labels. Such networks learn to remember a fixed set of emotional styles. In this paper, we propose a novel framework based on variational auto-encoding Wasserstein generative adversarial network (VAW-GAN), which makes use of a pre-trained speech emotion recognition (SER) model to transfer emotional style during training and at run-time inference. In this way, the network is able to transfer both seen and unseen emotional style to a new utterance. We show that the proposed framework achieves remarkable performance by consistently outperforming the baseline framework. This paper also marks the release of an emotional speech dataset (ESD) for voice conversion, which has multiple speakers and languages. |