English

Prosody-Guided Harmonic Attention for Phase-Coherent Neural Vocoding in the Complex Spectrum

Sound 2026-01-22 v1 Artificial Intelligence Computation and Language

Abstract

Neural vocoders are central to speech synthesis; despite their success, most still suffer from limited prosody modeling and inaccurate phase reconstruction. We propose a vocoder that introduces prosody-guided harmonic attention to enhance voiced segment encoding and directly predicts complex spectral components for waveform synthesis via inverse STFT. Unlike mel-spectrogram-based approaches, our design jointly models magnitude and phase, ensuring phase coherence and improved pitch fidelity. To further align with perceptual quality, we adopt a multi-objective training strategy that integrates adversarial, spectral, and phase-aware losses. Experiments on benchmark datasets demonstrate consistent gains over HiFi-GAN and AutoVocoder: F0 RMSE reduced by 22 percent, voiced/unvoiced error lowered by 18 percent, and MOS scores improved by 0.15. These results show that prosody-guided attention combined with direct complex spectrum modeling yields more natural, pitch-accurate, and robust synthetic speech, setting a strong foundation for expressive neural vocoding.

Keywords

Cite

@article{arxiv.2601.14472,
  title  = {Prosody-Guided Harmonic Attention for Phase-Coherent Neural Vocoding in the Complex Spectrum},
  author = {Mohammed Salah Al-Radhi and Riad Larbi and Mátyás Bartalis and Géza Németh},
  journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:2601.14472},
  year   = {2026}
}

Comments

5 pages, 2 figures, 1 table. Accepted for presentation at ICASSP 2026

R2 v1 2026-07-01T09:13:14.576Z