Robust universal neural vocoding

This paper introduces a robust universal neural vocoder trained with 74 speakers (comprised of both genders) coming from 17 languages. This vocoder is shown to be capable of generating speech of consistently good quality (98% relative mean MUSHRA when compared to natural speech) regardless of whether the input spectrogram comes from a speaker, style or recording condition seen during training or from an out-of-domain scenario. Together with the system, we present a full text-to-speech analysis of robustness of a number of implemented systems. The complexity of systems tested range from a convolutional neural networks-based system conditioned on linguistics to a recurrent neural networks-based system conditioned on mel-spectrograms. The analysis shows that convolutional neural networks-based systems are prone to occasional instabilities, while the recurrent approaches are significantly more stable and capable of providing universalizing robustness.


INTRODUCTION
Statistical parametric speech synthesis (SPSS) has seen a paradigm change recently, mainly thanks to the introduction of a number of autoregressive models [1,2,3,4,5], turning into what could be called statistical speech waveform synthesis (SSWS). This change has closed the gap in naturalness between statistical text to speech (TTS) and natural recordings, maintaining the flexibility of statistical models.
In the case of traditional vocoding [6,7,8,9], approaches commonly relied on simplified models (e.g. source-filter model [10]) that were defined by acoustic features such as the voicing decisions, the fundamental frequency (F0), melgeneralized cepstrum (MGC) or band aperiodicities. The quality of those traditional vocoders was limited by the assumptions made by the underlying model and the difficulty to accurately estimate the features from the speech signal.
Traditional waveform generation algorithms, while capable of generating speech from their spectral representation such as Griffin-Lim [11], are not capable of generating speech Corresponding author email: truebaj@amazon.com. Paper submitted to IEEE ICASSP 2019 with acceptable naturalness. This is due to the lack of phase information in the short-time Fourier transform (STFT).
Neural vocoders are a data-driven method where neural networks learn to reconstruct an audio waveform from acoustic features [1,2,12]. They allow us to overcome the shortcomings of traditional methods [13] at a very significant cost in computation power and data requirements. However, due to sparsity (it is unlikely that we will ever be able to cover all possible human-generated sounds) the neural vocoder models are prone to over-fit to the training speaker characteristics and have poor generalization capabilities [14]. Several recent studies attempted to improve the adaptation capabilities of such models [15,16], commonly using explicit speaker information (either as a onehot encoding or some other form of speaker embedding) [17]. There are however reports in literature of initial successes training neural vocoders without providing explicit speaker information [18], however the investigation did not cover the details of the robustness of this model to changes in domain and to unseen speakers. This paper makes the following contributions: 1) it demonstrates that a speaker encoding is not required to train a top quality speaker-independent (SI) neural vocoder; 2) quality with a SI neural vocoder is as good, if not better than, that of a speaker dependent (SD); 3) with the SI neural vocoder we can synthesise with speakers that were unseen in the training data, which is not possible with vocoders trained with explicit speaker information. The SI vocoder in this paper appears to be very effective at reading mel spectrograms and producing the corresponding speech waveform, without requiring any supplementary information, behaving as a universal vocoder.

SYSTEMS DESCRIPTION
Even though CNN-based systems have been thoroughly researched and real-time implementations have been proposed [4,19], it is known that they are prone to instabilities [20] which occasionally affect perceptual quality. RNN-based systems, on the other hand, can be expected to provide a more stable output due to the persistence of their hidden state, at least for the vocoding task in which context is not critical beyond the closest spectrogram frames (a known characteristic of RNNs). Table 1 overviews the systems. The linguistic RNN system was not up to par, so it was discarded.  [2], only with minor changes in the conditioning network) is described in Figure 1. The autoregressive side consists of a single forward GRU (hidden size of 896) and a pair of affine layers followed by a softmax layer with 1024 outputs, predicting the 10-bit mu-law samples for a 24 kHz sampling rate. The conditioning network consists of a pair of bi-directional gated recurrent units (GRUs) with a hidden size 128. The mel-spectrograms used for conditioning the network were extracted using Librosa library [21], with 80 coefficients and frequencies ranging from 50 Hz to 12 kHz.
We trained system RNN MS in 4 different configurations, whose details are shown in Table 2.1. First three SD systems were trained on American English speakers, two female (F1 and F2) and 1 male (M1) from our internal corpora.
We also trained 3 multi-speaker vocoders, one with all the training data from the 3 SD voices (3Spk), another one with 7 American English speakers (7Spk) comprising 4 females, 2 males and 1 child but with restricted amounts of training data per speaker (5000 utterances). This 7Spk neural vocoder aims to check whether variability or data (i.e. 3Spk) are more important for robustness in general. Finally we trained what is introduced as our universal neural vocoder with 74 different voices, in a 22 males and 52 females, extracted from 17 languages, with approx. 2000 utterances per speaker. This neural vocoder was designed with the expectation of being generalizable to any incoming speaker regardless of whether it was seen during training or not. Multiple (17) Early implementations of the universal neural vocoder explicitly included speaker information via a variational encoding of the input spectrograms to handle the inherent variability in the training data better, it proved to be unnecessary. Such encodings did not provide any naturalness improvements, which can be explained by the mel-spectrogram already containing sufficient information about the speaker, making it redundant in our scenario.

CNN models
The trained CNN-based models follow the topology introduced in [5] and were trained only on a single speaker, F1. The only variations from those in [5] are the input to the model (linguistic features as used in [5] or mel-spectrograms as an addition in the present paper) and the structures of the CNN layers. The mel-spectrograms and audio specifications were analogous to those of the RNN models.
The CNN-based approaches implemented were: 1) an end-to-end linguistics-conditioned system (CNN LI, the system evaluated in [5]), 2) a vocoder (CNN MS) and 3) a smaller vocoder (SCNN MS). The purpose of training a smaller CNN vocoder was to increase inference time by reducing model complexity.

Naturalness analysis
To properly characterize the generalization capabilities of the different vocoders in terms of naturalness we considered a number of scenarios. First of all a topline scenario in which we generated speech from speakers present in the training data of all the vocoders, but with utterances not seen during training (section 4.2). Then, we also generated speech for speakers not present in the training data of any of the vocoders, with a mixture of male and female speakers neutral extracted from VCTK [22], with a speaking style similar to the training data but out of domain in terms of speaker and recording conditions. Finally we also evaluated highly expressive children audiobook speech extracted from Bliz-zard2013 development set [23], which was out of domain in speaker, speaking style and recording conditions. Experiments were carried out with oracle spectrograms unless stated otherwise. The naturalness perceptual evaluation was designed as a MUltiple Stimuli with Hidden Reference and Anchor (MUSHRA) test [24], where the participants were presented with the systems being evaluated side-by-side, asked to rate them in terms of naturalness from 0 (very poor) to 100 (completely natural). The test consisted of 200 randomly-selected utterances for the different speakers, these were not included in the training data. The evaluation was balanced so that every utterance was rated by 5 listeners, and each listener rates 20 screens. The evaluations were conducted with self-reported native American English speakers using Amazon Mechanical Turk. In total 50 listeners participated in each evaluation.
Paired Student T-tests with Holm-Bonferroni correction were used to validate the statistical significance of the differences between systems, considering it validated when p − value < 0.01. We use the ratio between the mean MUSHRA score of a system and natural speech, from now on 'relative MUSHRA', to illustrate the quality gap with the reference.

Glitch analysis
This evaluation is aimed at gauging the nature of speech errors present in the evaluated SSWS systems. 4 internal listeners were asked to rate 50 different samples for each of the 4 considered systems, for a total of 200 rated utterances per system. For each sample the evaluators decided if a speech error was present, the perceived nature of the error and its severity (i.e. minor, medium, critical).

CNN vs. RNN evaluation
To narrow down the number of systems to be analyzed in the robustness investigations we compared first of all the complete set of introduced systems, aiming only the best amongst them. For this evaluation we considered predicted spectrograms in the case of vocoders, to provide a fair comparison ground for CNN LI. The spectrograms were predicted with our internal sequence-to-sequence model, based on Tacotron2  [3] and explained in detail in [25]. The naturalness evaluation of the systems (figure 2 showed no significant difference between the vocoders, with CNN LI falling behind, which we hypothesize is likely due to its less dynamic prosody. From the glitch analysis (table 3) the following conclusions can be drawn: First of all, system CNN LI showed to be overall more prone to glitches (51 out of 200 utterances) due to the much more complex nature of the task, as there is no support module capable of generating an intermediate acoustic representation such as the mel-spectrograms. Secondly, we can see how reducing the size of the CNN-based vocoder (system SCNN MS) significantly increased the medium + critical glitches compared to the full-size implementation (system CNN MS) (25 vs. 14). Finally, this analysis confirms the hypothesis that the RNN-based system (RNN MS) is the most stable approach in both absolute terms (20) and when only looking at medium + critical (8).
From this point onwards we will focus only on the RNNbased system (RNN MS).

In-domain speakers
This evaluation considered 2 female speakers and 1 male speaker (the same speakers used to train the 3Spk vocoder). The results in Figure 3 show a clear story. There is no significant difference in terms of evaluated naturalness when using any of the trained vocoders as long as the speakers were part of the training data. This is a strong result for the proposed universal vocoder, as it showed no degradation when compared to the highly specific SD neural vocoder. Moreover, while there was a statistically significant difference, between vocoded and natural naturalness, it was minimal (98.5% relative MUSHRA scores). It must be noted that while there were inter-speaker differences, those did not affect the rankorder of the systems' ratings, so results are presented only as averages.

Out-of-domain speakers
In this evaluation, we considered out of domain speakers for which an SD vocoder was not available. As such, results are expectedly poor in comparison to some of the more general neural vocoders. It was included as a reference and selected by looking for the system with the smallest distance as per the protocol defined in the following sub-section.

Selecting speaker dependent vocoders
In order to limit the perceptual evaluation complexity we tried to predict the best SD vocoder to run inference with. For that we built multi-variate Gaussian Mixture Models (GMMs) of the training data of the different vocoders and of the target speaker, then obtained the Kullback-Leibler divergence (KLD) between the GMMs. This could be improved by applying conventional speaker similarity measures, but the measure proves to be reliable with a correlation of 0.81 between the KLD and the naturalness degradation obtained through the perceptual evaluations, with degradation being defined as the difference between natural speech and system mean MUSHRA. The analysis concluded that F1 was closest to the female out-of-domain speakers, and M1 to the males.

Neutral style speakers
Results ( Figure 4) show an interesting picture. The more variety in number of training speakers the better the achieved quality, to the point where the proposed universal system is capable of providing practically the same relative MUSHRA score as for in-domain speakers (98% vs. 98.5%). This speaks very strongly about the generalization capabilities of such a system. Moreover, we can see how the vocoder trained with more speakers but with less training data (7Spk) is capable of providing better quality than the other two systems (SD and 3Spk), suggesting that variability is more important than quantity for generalization. Similarly to what happened in the in-domain evaluation, the inter-speaker variability did not affect the rank-ordering, so we only show averaged results.

Audiobook style speakers
In the case of highly expressive data, including disfluencies and onomatopoeias, (see Figure 5) the universal vocoder is still capable of proving steady quality, once again maintaining the relative MUSHRA scores at 98%. Both SD and 7Spk show comparatively poor performance, while 3Spk breaks the trend. This is confirmed by the KLD between the audiobook speaker and those of the vocoders (2.64 against Univ, 5.42 against 3Spk, 14.45 against 7Spk and 14.62 against SD).

Other evaluations
We carried out evaluations analogous to those presented but with Japanese, which was an in-domain language. Interestingly, results were extremely similar to those in US English (98% relative MUSHRA), hence we do not report them in detail. This comforts us in the observation that the universal neural vocoder can be expected to be robust not only to speaker, style and recording conditions but also language.

CONCLUSIONS
We have introduced a robust universal neural vocoder conditioned on mel-spectrograms, without any form of speaker encoding. The performance of this vocoder has been shown to be as good, if not better, than a SD neural vocoder. The universal vocoder has proven to be capable of generating speech for speakers not present in the training corpora, regardless of speaking style or language, with a relative MUSHRA score of 98%. A universal neural vocoder allows for future work to focus on spectrogram estimation from text to any new speaker, language or style without being constrained by training a specific neural vocoder.