Multi-task WaveRNN with an integrated architecture for cross-lingual voice conversion

Abstract

Spoken languages are similar phonetically because humans have a common vocal production system. However, each language has a unique phonetic repertoire and phonotactic rule. In cross-lingual voice conversion, source speaker and target speaker speak different languages. The challenge is how to project the speaker identity of the source speaker to that of the target across two different phonetic systems. A typical voice conversion system employs a generator-vocoder pipeline, where the generator is responsible for conversion, and the vocoder is for waveform reconstruction. We propose a novel Multi-Task WaveRNN with an integrated architecture for cross-lingual voice conversion. The WaveRNN is trained on two sets of monolingual data via a two-task learning. The integrated architecture takes linguistic features as input and outputs speech waveform directly. Voice conversion experiments are conducted between English and Mandarin, which confirm the effectiveness of the proposed method in terms of speech quality and speaker similarity.