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Emotional voice conversion aims at converting speech from one emotion state to another. This paper proposes to model timbre and prosody features using a deep bidirectional long shortterm memory (DBLSTM) for emotional voice conversion. A continuous wavelet transform (CWT) representation of fundamental frequency (F0) and energy contour are used for prosody modeling. Specifically, we use CWT to decompose F0 into a five-scale representation, and decompose energy contour into a ten-scale representation, where each feature scale corresponds to a temporal scale. Both spectrum and prosody (F0 and energy contour) features are simultaneously converted by a sequence to sequence conversion method with DBLSTM model, which captures both frame-wise and long-range relationship between source and target voice. The converted speech signals are evaluated both objectively and subjectively, which confirms the effectiveness of the proposed method.

This paper presents XiaoiceSing, a high-quality singing voice synthesis system which employs an integrated network for spectrum, F0 and duration modeling. We follow the main architecture of FastSpeech while proposing some singing-specific design: 1) Besides phoneme ID and position encoding, features from musical score (e.g.note pitch and length) are also added. 2) To attenuate off-key issues, we add a residual connection in F0 prediction. 3) In addition to the duration loss of each phoneme, the duration of all the phonemes in a musical note is accumulated to calculate the syllable duration loss for rhythm enhancement. Experiment results show that XiaoiceSing outperforms the baseline system of convolutional neural networks by 1.44 MOS on sound quality, 1.18 on pronunciation accuracy and 1.38 on naturalness respectively. In two A/B tests, the proposed F0 and duration modeling methods achieve 97.3% and 84.3% preference rate over baseline respectively, which demonstrates the overwhelming advantages of XiaoiceSing.

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