Learning Structured Sparse Representations for Voice Conversion

Sparse-coding techniques for voice conversion assume that an utterance can be decomposed into a sparse code that only carries linguistic contents, and a dictionary of atoms that captures the speakers' characteristics. However, conventional dictionary-construction and sparse-coding algorithms rarely meet this assumption. The result is that the sparse code is no longer speaker-independent, which leads to lower voice-conversion performance. In this paper, we propose a Cluster-Structured Sparse Representation (CSSR) that improves the speaker independence of the representations. CSSR consists of two complementary components: a Cluster-Structured Dictionary Learning module that groups atoms in the dictionary into clusters, and a Cluster-Selective Objective Function that encourages each speech frame to be represented by atoms from a small number of clusters. We conducted four experiments on the CMU ARCTIC corpus to evaluate the proposed method. In a first ablation study, results show that each of the two CSSR components enhances speaker independence, and that combining both components leads to further improvements. In a second experiment, we find that CSSR uses increasingly larger dictionaries more efficiently than phoneme-based representations by allowing finer-grained decompositions of speech sounds. In a third experiment, results from objective and subjective measurements show that CSSR outperforms prior voice-conversion methods, improving the acoustic quality of the synthesized speech while retaining the target speaker's voice identity. Finally, we show that the CSSR captures latent (i.e., phonetic) information in the speech signal.