Abbas, Ammar;
Merritt, Thomas;
Moinet, Alexis;
Karlapati, Sri;
Muszynska, Ewa;
Slangen, Simon;
Gatti, Elia;
(2022)
Expressive, Variable, and Controllable Duration Modelling in TTS.
arXiv
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Abstract
Duration modelling has become an important research problem once more with the rise of non-attention neural text-to-speech systems. The current approaches largely fall back to relying on previous statistical parametric speech synthesis technology for duration prediction, which poorly models the expressiveness and variability in speech. In this paper, we propose two alternate approaches to improve duration modelling. First, we propose a duration model conditioned on phrasing that improves the predicted durations and provides better modelling of pauses. We show that the duration model conditioned on phrasing improves the naturalness of speech over our baseline duration model. Second, we also propose a multi-speaker duration model called Cauliflow, that uses normalising flows to predict durations that better match the complex target duration distribution. Cauliflow performs on par with our other proposed duration model in terms of naturalness, whilst providing variable durations for the same prompt and variable levels of expressiveness. Lastly, we propose to condition Cauliflow on parameters that provide an intuitive control of the pacing and pausing in the synthesised speech in a novel way.
| Type: | Working / discussion paper |
|---|---|
| Title: | Expressive, Variable, and Controllable Duration Modelling in TTS |
| Open access status: | An open access version is available from UCL Discovery |
| Publisher version: | https://doi.org/10.48550/arXiv.2206.14165 |
| Language: | English |
| Additional information: | This version is the version of record. For information on re-use, please refer to the publisher’s terms and conditions. |
| Keywords: | Neural text-to-speech, normalising flows, expressive TTS, duration modelling |
| UCL classification: | UCL UCL > Provost and Vice Provost Offices > UCL BEAMS UCL > Provost and Vice Provost Offices > UCL BEAMS > Faculty of Engineering Science UCL > Provost and Vice Provost Offices > UCL BEAMS > Faculty of Engineering Science > Dept of Computer Science |
| URI: | https://discovery.ucl.ac.uk/id/eprint/10166090 |
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