Content area

Abstract

Vocal tract articulation is a natural, grounded control space of speech production. The spatiotemporal coordination of articulators combined with the vocal source shapes intelligible speech sounds to enable effective spoken communication. Based on this physiological grounding of speech, we propose a new framework of neural encoding-decoding of speech -- Speech Articulatory Coding (SPARC). SPARC comprises an articulatory analysis model that infers articulatory features from speech audio, and an articulatory synthesis model that synthesizes speech audio from articulatory features. The articulatory features are kinematic traces of vocal tract articulators and source features, which are intuitively interpretable and controllable, being the actual physical interface of speech production. An additional speaker identity encoder is jointly trained with the articulatory synthesizer to inform the voice texture of individual speakers. By training on large-scale speech data, we achieve a fully intelligible, high-quality articulatory synthesizer that generalizes to unseen speakers. Furthermore, the speaker embedding is effectively disentangled from articulations, which enables accent-perserving zero-shot voice conversion. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first demonstration of universal, high-performance articulatory inference and synthesis, suggesting the proposed framework as a powerful coding system of speech.

Details

1009240
Title
Coding Speech through Vocal Tract Kinematics
Publication title
arXiv.org; Ithaca
Publication year
2024
Publication date
Dec 14, 2024
Section
Computer Science; Electrical Engineering and Systems Science
Publisher
Cornell University Library, arXiv.org
Source
arXiv.org
Place of publication
Ithaca
Country of publication
United States
University/institution
Cornell University Library arXiv.org
e-ISSN
2331-8422
Source type
Working Paper
Language of publication
English
Document type
Working Paper
Publication history
 
 
Online publication date
2024-12-17
Milestone dates
2024-06-18 (Submission v1); 2024-08-21 (Submission v2); 2024-10-16 (Submission v3); 2024-12-14 (Submission v4)
Publication history
 
 
   First posting date
17 Dec 2024
ProQuest document ID
3070857631
Document URL
https://www.proquest.com/working-papers/coding-speech-through-vocal-tract-kinematics/docview/3070857631/se-2?accountid=208611
Full text outside of ProQuest
Copyright
© 2024. This work is published under http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/ (the “License”). Notwithstanding the ProQuest Terms and Conditions, you may use this content in accordance with the terms of the License.
Last updated
2024-12-18
Database
ProQuest One Academic