Enhancement of Pitch Controllability using Timbre-Preserving Pitch Augmentation in FastPitch
Hanbin Bae, Young-Sun Joo · Interspeech 2022 · 2022
The recently developed pitch-controllable text-to-speech (TTS) model, i.e.FastPitch, was conditioned for the pitch contours.However, the quality of the synthesized speech degraded considerably for pitch values that deviated significantly from the average pitch; i.e. the ability to control pitch was limited.To address this issue, we propose two algorithms to improve the robustness of FastPitch.First, we propose a novel timbrepreserving pitch-shifting algorithm for natural pitch augmentation.Pitch-shifted speech samples sound more natural when using the proposed algorithm because the speaker's vocal timbre is maintained.Moreover, we propose a training algorithm that defines FastPitch using pitch-augmented speech datasets with different pitch ranges for the same sentence.The experimental results demonstrate that the proposed algorithms improve the pitch controllability of FastPitch.