Gyeong-Hoon Lee

Hayeon Bang, Eunjin Choi, Megan Finch et al.

While piano music has become a significant area of study in Music Information Retrieval (MIR), there is a notable lack of datasets for piano solo music with text labels. To address this gap, we present PIAST (PIano dataset with Audio, Symbolic, and Text), a piano music dataset. Utilizing a piano-specific taxonomy of semantic tags, we collected 9,673 tracks from YouTube and added human annotations for 2,023 tracks by music experts, resulting in two subsets: PIAST-YT and PIAST-AT. Both include audio, text, tag annotations, and transcribed MIDI utilizing state-of-the-art piano transcription and beat tracking models. Among many possible tasks with the multi-modal dataset, we conduct music tagging and retrieval using both audio and MIDI data and report baseline performances to demonstrate its potential as a valuable resource for MIR research.

Gyeong-Hoon Lee, Tae-Woo Kim, Hanbin Bae et al.

Recently, end-to-end Korean singing voice systems have been designed to generate realistic singing voices. However, these systems still suffer from a lack of robustness in terms of pronunciation accuracy. In this paper, we propose N-Singer, a non-autoregressive Korean singing voice system, to synthesize accurate and pronounced Korean singing voices in parallel. N-Singer consists of a Transformer-based mel-generator, a convolutional network-based postnet, and voicing-aware discriminators. It can contribute in the following ways. First, for accurate pronunciation, N-Singer separately models linguistic and pitch information without other acoustic features. Second, to achieve improved mel-spectrograms, N-Singer uses a combination of Transformer-based modules and convolutional network-based modules. Third, in adversarial training, voicing-aware conditional discriminators are used to capture the harmonic features of voiced segments and noise components of unvoiced segments. The experimental results prove that N-Singer can synthesize a natural singing voice in parallel with a more accurate pronunciation than the baseline model.

Jae-Sung Bae, Hanbin Bae, Young-Sun Joo et al.

This paper proposes a controllable end-to-end text-to-speech (TTS) system to control the speaking speed (speed-controllable TTS; SCTTS) of synthesized speech with sentence-level speaking-rate value as an additional input. The speaking-rate value, the ratio of the number of input phonemes to the length of input speech, is adopted in the proposed system to control the speaking speed. Furthermore, the proposed SCTTS system can control the speaking speed while retaining other speech attributes, such as the pitch, by adopting the global style token-based style encoder. The proposed SCTTS does not require any additional well-trained model or an external speech database to extract phoneme-level duration information and can be trained in an end-to-end manner. In addition, our listening tests on fast-, normal-, and slow-speed speech showed that the SCTTS can generate more natural speech than other phoneme duration control approaches which increase or decrease duration at the same rate for the entire sentence, especially in the case of slow-speed speech.