Singing voice conversion with non-parallel data
This addresses the problem of singer voice conversion for music applications without needing aligned data, presenting an incremental advance by adapting existing non-parallel techniques to singing.
The paper tackled singing voice conversion without parallel training data by using ASR-derived phonetic features and a DBLSTM-RNN to map content to target acoustic features, achieving subjective effectiveness in conversion.
Singing voice conversion is a task to convert a song sang by a source singer to the voice of a target singer. In this paper, we propose using a parallel data free, many-to-one voice conversion technique on singing voices. A phonetic posterior feature is first generated by decoding singing voices through a robust Automatic Speech Recognition Engine (ASR). Then, a trained Recurrent Neural Network (RNN) with a Deep Bidirectional Long Short Term Memory (DBLSTM) structure is used to model the mapping from person-independent content to the acoustic features of the target person. F0 and aperiodic are obtained through the original singing voice, and used with acoustic features to reconstruct the target singing voice through a vocoder. In the obtained singing voice, the targeted and sourced singers sound similar. To our knowledge, this is the first study that uses non parallel data to train a singing voice conversion system. Subjective evaluations demonstrate that the proposed method effectively converts singing voices.