Learning the Beauty in Songs: Neural Singing Voice Beautifier
This addresses the problem of enhancing amateur singing recordings for users in music production or entertainment, representing a novel task with incremental improvements in robustness and tone conversion.
The paper tackles the task of singing voice beautifying (SVB) by improving intonation and vocal tone in amateur recordings while preserving content and timbre, introducing the Neural Singing Voice Beautifier (NSVB) with a novel time-warping approach and latent-mapping algorithm, achieving effectiveness demonstrated through objective and subjective metrics on Chinese and English songs.
We are interested in a novel task, singing voice beautifying (SVB). Given the singing voice of an amateur singer, SVB aims to improve the intonation and vocal tone of the voice, while keeping the content and vocal timbre. Current automatic pitch correction techniques are immature, and most of them are restricted to intonation but ignore the overall aesthetic quality. Hence, we introduce Neural Singing Voice Beautifier (NSVB), the first generative model to solve the SVB task, which adopts a conditional variational autoencoder as the backbone and learns the latent representations of vocal tone. In NSVB, we propose a novel time-warping approach for pitch correction: Shape-Aware Dynamic Time Warping (SADTW), which ameliorates the robustness of existing time-warping approaches, to synchronize the amateur recording with the template pitch curve. Furthermore, we propose a latent-mapping algorithm in the latent space to convert the amateur vocal tone to the professional one. To achieve this, we also propose a new dataset containing parallel singing recordings of both amateur and professional versions. Extensive experiments on both Chinese and English songs demonstrate the effectiveness of our methods in terms of both objective and subjective metrics. Audio samples are available at~\url{https://neuralsvb.github.io}. Codes: \url{https://github.com/MoonInTheRiver/NeuralSVB}.