English

Blow: a single-scale hyperconditioned flow for non-parallel raw-audio voice conversion

Machine Learning 2019-09-06 v2 Sound Audio and Speech Processing Machine Learning

Abstract

End-to-end models for raw audio generation are a challenge, specially if they have to work with non-parallel data, which is a desirable setup in many situations. Voice conversion, in which a model has to impersonate a speaker in a recording, is one of those situations. In this paper, we propose Blow, a single-scale normalizing flow using hypernetwork conditioning to perform many-to-many voice conversion between raw audio. Blow is trained end-to-end, with non-parallel data, on a frame-by-frame basis using a single speaker identifier. We show that Blow compares favorably to existing flow-based architectures and other competitive baselines, obtaining equal or better performance in both objective and subjective evaluations. We further assess the impact of its main components with an ablation study, and quantify a number of properties such as the necessary amount of training data or the preference for source or target speakers.

Keywords

Cite

@article{arxiv.1906.00794,
  title  = {Blow: a single-scale hyperconditioned flow for non-parallel raw-audio voice conversion},
  author = {Joan Serrà and Santiago Pascual and Carlos Segura},
  journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:1906.00794},
  year   = {2019}
}

Comments

Includes appendix. Accepted for NeurIPS2019

R2 v1 2026-06-23T09:38:56.875Z