EXPLORING SELF-SUPERVISED CONTRASTIVE LEARNING OF SPATIAL SOUND EVENT REPRESENTATION.

In this study, we present a simple multi-channel framework for contrastive learning (MC-SimCLR) to encode 'what' and 'where' of spatial audios. MC-SimCLR learns joint spectral and spatial representations from unlabeled spatial audios, thereby enhancing both event classification and sound localization in downstream tasks. At its core, we propose a multi-level data augmentation pipeline that augments different levels of audio features, including waveforms, Mel spectrograms, and generalized cross-correlation (GCC) features.

Improved Decoding of Attentional Selection in Multi-Talker Environments with Self-Supervised Learned Speech Representation.

Auditory attention decoding (AAD) is a technique used to identify and amplify the talker that a listener is focused on in a noisy environment. This is done by comparing the listener's brainwaves to a representation of all the sound sources to find the closest match. The representation is typically the waveform or spectrogram of the sounds.

PHONEME-LEVEL BERT FOR ENHANCED PROSODY OF TEXT-TO-SPEECH WITH GRAPHEME PREDICTIONS.

Large-scale pre-trained language models have been shown to be helpful in improving the naturalness of text-to-speech (TTS) models by enabling them to produce more naturalistic prosodic patterns. However, these models are usually word-level or sup-phoneme-level and jointly trained with phonemes, making them inefficient for the downstream TTS task where only phonemes are needed. In this work, we propose a phoneme-level BERT (PL-BERT) with a pretext task of predicting the corresponding graphemes along with the regular masked phoneme predictions.

STYLETTS-VC: ONE-SHOT VOICE CONVERSION BY KNOWLEDGE TRANSFER FROM STYLE-BASED TTS MODELS.

One-shot voice conversion (VC) aims to convert speech from any source speaker to an arbitrary target speaker with only a few seconds of reference speech from the target speaker. This relies heavily on disentangling the speaker's identity and speech content, a task that still remains challenging. Here, we propose a novel approach to learning disentangled speech representation by transfer learning from style-based text-to-speech (TTS) models.