Diverse and Vivid Sound Generation from Text Descriptions

Previous audio generation mainly focuses on specified sound classes such as speech or music, whose form and content are greatly restricted. In this paper, we go beyond specific audio generation by using natural language description as a clue to generate broad sounds. Unlike visual information, a text description is concise by its nature but has rich hidden meanings beneath, which poses a higher possibility and complexity on the audio to be generated. A Variation-Quantized GAN is used to train a codebook learning discrete representations of spectrograms. For a given text description, its pre-trained embedding is fed to a Transformer to sample codebook indices to decode a spectrogram to be further transformed into waveform by a melgan vocoder. The generated waveform has high quality and fidelity while excellently corresponding to the given text. Experiments show that our proposed method is capable of generating natural, vivid audios, achieving superb quantitative and qualitative results.