The AudioLabs System for the Blizzard Challenge 2023
Frank Zalkow, Paolo Sani, Michael Fast, Judith Bauer, Mohammad Joshaghani, Kishor Kayyar Lakshminarayana, Emanuël A. P. Habets, Christian Dittmar · 2023
In this paper, we describe our contribution to the Blizzard Challenge 2023.This challenge has the goal of understanding and comparing research techniques in building corpus-based speech synthesizers on the same data.The 2023 edition of the challenge focuses on the French language and low-resource settings.Our text-to-speech (TTS) synthesis system consists of three main building blocks.First, a non-autoregressive acoustic model converts symbolic input sequences (phonemes) into mel-scaled speech spectrograms.Second, a post-processing model based on a generative adversarial network (GAN) enhances the predicted mel spectrograms.Third, the GAN-based neural vocoder StyleMelGAN converts the enhanced spectrogram into a time-domain speech waveform.