Whisper to Normal Speech Conversion Using Sequence-to-Sequence Mapping Model With Auditory Attention

• Main Authors: Hailun Lian, Yuting Hu, Weiwei Yu, Jian Zhou, Wenming Zheng
• Format: Article
• Language: English
• Published: IEEE 2019-01-01
• Series: IEEE Access
• Subjects: Auditory attention mechanism; sequence-to-sequence; speech quality; whisper conversion
• Online Access: https://ieeexplore.ieee.org/document/8835014/

Whispering is a special pronunciation style in which the vocal cords do not vibrate. Compared with voiced speech, whispering is noise-like because of the lack of a fundamental frequency. The energy of whispered speech is approximately 20 dB lower than that of voiced speech. Converting whispering into normal speech is an effective way to improve speech quality and/or intelligibility. In this paper, we propose a whisper-to-normal speech conversion method based on a sequence-to-sequence framework combined with an auditory attention mechanism. The proposed method does not require time aligning before conversion training, which makes it more applicable to real scenarios. In addition, the fundamental frequency is estimated from the mel frequency cepstral coefficients estimated by the proposed sequence-to-sequence framework. The voiced speech converted by the proposed method has appropriate length, which is determined adaptively by the proposed sequence-to-sequence model according to the source whispered speech. Experimental results show that the proposed sequence-to-sequence whisper-to-normal speech conversion method outperforms conventional DTW-based methods.