Jan Melechovský

Jan Melechovsky, Ambuj Mehrish, Berrak Sisman et al.

Accent plays a significant role in speech communication, influencing one's capability to understand as well as conveying a person's identity. This paper introduces a novel and efficient framework for accented Text-to-Speech (TTS) synthesis based on a Conditional Variational Autoencoder. It has the ability to synthesize a selected speaker's voice, and convert this to any desired target accent. Our thorough experiments validate the effectiveness of the proposed framework using both objective and subjective evaluations. The results also show remarkable performance in terms of the model's ability to manipulate accents in the synthesized speech. Overall, our proposed framework presents a promising avenue for future accented TTS research.

Jan Melechovsky, Ambuj Mehrish, Berrak Sisman et al.

Recent advancements in Text-to-Speech (TTS) systems have enabled the generation of natural and expressive speech from textual input. Accented TTS aims to enhance user experience by making the synthesized speech more relatable to minority group listeners, and useful across various applications and context. Speech synthesis can further be made more flexible by allowing users to choose any combination of speaker identity and accent, resulting in a wide range of personalized speech outputs. Current models struggle to disentangle speaker and accent representation, making it difficult to accurately imitate different accents while maintaining the same speaker characteristics. We propose a novel approach to disentangle speaker and accent representations using multi-level variational autoencoders (ML-VAE) and vector quantization (VQ) to improve flexibility and enhance personalization in speech synthesis. Our proposed method addresses the challenge of effectively separating speaker and accent characteristics, enabling more fine-grained control over the synthesized speech. Code and speech samples are publicly available.

Tongyu Lu, Charlotta-Marlena Geist, Jan Melechovsky et al.

We propose MelodySim, a melody-aware music similarity model and dataset for plagiarism detection. First, we introduce a novel method to construct a dataset focused on melodic similarity. By augmenting Slakh2100, an existing MIDI dataset, we generate variations of each piece while preserving the melody through modifications such as note splitting, arpeggiation, minor track dropout, and re-instrumentation. A user study confirms that positive pairs indeed contain similar melodies, while other musical tracks are significantly changed. Second, we develop a segment-wise melodic-similarity detection model that uses a MERT encoder and applies a triplet neural network to capture melodic similarity. The resulting decision matrix highlights where plagiarism might occur. The experiments show that our model is able to outperform baseline models in detecting similar melodic fragments on the MelodySim test set.

Jan Melechovsky, Abhinaba Roy, Dorien Herremans

Generative models guided by text prompts are increasingly becoming more popular. However, no text-to-MIDI models currently exist due to the lack of a captioned MIDI dataset. This work aims to enable research that combines LLMs with symbolic music by presenting, the first openly available large-scale MIDI dataset with text captions. MIDI (Musical Instrument Digital Interface) files are widely used for encoding musical information and can capture the nuances of musical composition. They are widely used by music producers, composers, musicologists, and performers alike. Inspired by recent advancements in captioning techniques, we present a curated dataset of over 168k MIDI files with textual descriptions. Each MIDI caption describes the musical content, including tempo, chord progression, time signature, instruments, genre, and mood, thus facilitating multi-modal exploration and analysis. The dataset encompasses various genres, styles, and complexities, offering a rich data source for training and evaluating models for tasks such as music information retrieval, music understanding, and cross-modal translation. We provide detailed statistics about the dataset and have assessed the quality of the captions in an extensive listening study. We anticipate that this resource will stimulate further research at the intersection of music and natural language processing, fostering advancements in both fields.

Jan Melechovsky, Ambuj Mehrish, Berrak Sisman et al.

With rapid globalization, the need to build inclusive and representative speech technology cannot be overstated. Accent is an important aspect of speech that needs to be taken into consideration while building inclusive speech synthesizers. Inclusive speech technology aims to erase any biases towards specific groups, such as people of certain accent. We note that state-of-the-art Text-to-Speech (TTS) systems may currently not be suitable for all people, regardless of their background, as they are designed to generate high-quality voices without focusing on accent. In this paper, we propose a TTS model that utilizes a Multi-Level Variational Autoencoder with adversarial learning to address accented speech synthesis and conversion in TTS, with a vision for more inclusive systems in the future. We evaluate the performance through both objective metrics and subjective listening tests. The results show an improvement in accent conversion ability compared to the baseline.