# Parallel WaveGAN: A fast waveform generation model based on generative adversarial networks with multi-resolution spectrogram

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/1910.11480 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/1910.11480/

## Key facts

- Cited by 340 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- First posted on arXiv 25 Oct 2019.

## Built on by (most cited first, 30 of 340)

- [DiffWave: A Versatile Diffusion Model for Audio Synthesis](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2009.09761/) (2020)
- [High Fidelity Neural Audio Compression](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2210.13438/) (2022)
- [Grad-TTS: A Diffusion Probabilistic Model for Text-to-Speech](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2105.06337/) (2021)
- [High-Fidelity Audio Compression with Improved RVQGAN](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2306.06546/) (2023)
- [Voicebox: Text-Guided Multilingual Universal Speech Generation at Scale](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2306.15687/) (2023)
- [AudioGen: Textually Guided Audio Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2209.15352/) (2022)
- [BigVGAN: A Universal Neural Vocoder with Large-Scale Training](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2206.04658/) (2022)
- [Diff-Instruct: A Universal Approach for Transferring Knowledge From Pre-trained Diffusion Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2305.18455/) (2023)
- [A Survey on Neural Speech Synthesis](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2106.15561/) (2021)
- [SpeechT5: Unified-Modal Encoder-Decoder Pre-Training for Spoken Language Processing](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2110.07205/) (2021)
- [It's Raw! Audio Generation with State-Space Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2202.09729/) (2022)
- [DiffSinger: Singing Voice Synthesis via Shallow Diffusion Mechanism](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2105.02446/) (2021)
- [ProDiff: Progressive Fast Diffusion Model For High-Quality Text-to-Speech](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2207.06389/) (2022)
- [Deepfakes Generation and Detection: State-of-the-art, open challenges, countermeasures, and way forward](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2103.00484/) (2021)
- [PriorGrad: Improving Conditional Denoising Diffusion Models with Data-Dependent Adaptive Prior](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2106.06406/) (2021)
- [WaveFake: A Data Set to Facilitate Audio Deepfake Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2111.02813/) (2021)
- [Universal Speech Enhancement with Score-based Diffusion](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2206.03065/) (2022)
- [RAVE: A variational autoencoder for fast and high-quality neural audio synthesis](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2111.05011/) (2021)
- [SQ-VAE: Variational Bayes on Discrete Representation with Self-annealed Stochastic Quantization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2205.07547/) (2022)
- [WaveGrad 2: Iterative Refinement for Text-to-Speech Synthesis](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2106.09660/) (2021)
- [VQMIVC: Vector Quantization and Mutual Information-Based Unsupervised Speech Representation Disentanglement for One-shot Voice Conversion](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2106.10132/) (2021)
- [BDDM: Bilateral Denoising Diffusion Models for Fast and High-Quality Speech Synthesis](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2203.13508/) (2022)
- [StarGANv2-VC: A Diverse, Unsupervised, Non-parallel Framework for Natural-Sounding Voice Conversion](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2107.10394/) (2021)
- [Mega-TTS: Zero-Shot Text-to-Speech at Scale with Intrinsic Inductive Bias](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2306.03509/) (2023)
- [Visual Acoustic Matching](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2202.06875/) (2022)
- [A3T: Alignment-Aware Acoustic and Text Pretraining for Speech Synthesis and Editing](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2203.09690/) (2022)
- [Neural Dubber: Dubbing for Videos According to Scripts](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2110.08243/) (2021)
- [SpecGrad: Diffusion Probabilistic Model based Neural Vocoder with Adaptive Noise Spectral Shaping](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2203.16749/) (2022)
- [Bilateral Denoising Diffusion Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2108.11514/) (2021)
- [Emotion Intensity and its Control for Emotional Voice Conversion](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2201.03967/) (2022)

## Abstract (arXiv)

We propose Parallel WaveGAN, a distillation-free, fast, and small-footprint waveform generation method using a generative adversarial network. In the proposed method, a non-autoregressive WaveNet is trained by jointly optimizing multi-resolution spectrogram and adversarial loss functions, which can effectively capture the time-frequency distribution of the realistic speech waveform. As our method does not require density distillation used in the conventional teacher-student framework, the entire model can be easily trained. Furthermore, our model is able to generate high-fidelity speech even with its compact architecture. In particular, the proposed Parallel WaveGAN has only 1.44 M parameters and can generate 24 kHz speech waveform 28.68 times faster than real-time on a single GPU environment. Perceptual listening test results verify that our proposed method achieves 4.16 mean opinion score within a Transformer-based text-to-speech framework, which is comparative to the best distillation-based Parallel WaveNet system.