Title
Expressive Voice Conversion: A Joint Framework for Speaker Identity and Emotional Style Transfer
Abstract
Traditional voice conversion (VC) has been focused on speaker identity conversion for speech with a neutral expression. We note that emotional expression plays an essential role in daily communication, and the emotional style of speech can be speaker-dependent. In this paper, we study a technique to jointly convert the speaker identity and speaker-dependent emotional style, that is called expressive voice conversion. We propose a StarGAN-based framework to learn a many-to-many mapping across different speakers, that takes into account speaker-dependent emotional style without the need for parallel data. To this end, we condition the generator on emotional style encoding derived from a pre-trained speech emotion recognition (SER) model. The experiments validate the effectiveness of our proposed framework in both objective and subjective evaluations. To our best knowledge, this is the first study on expressive voice conversion.
Year
DOI
Venue
2021
10.1109/ASRU51503.2021.9687906
2021 IEEE Automatic Speech Recognition and Understanding Workshop (ASRU)
Keywords
DocType
ISBN
Voice conversion,emotion style features,StarGAN
Conference
978-1-6654-3740-0
Citations 
PageRank 
References 
0
0.34
18
Authors
4
Name
Order
Citations
PageRank
Zongyang Du100.34
Berrak Sisman26010.34
Kun Zhou300.34
Haizhou Li43678334.61