# Global Rhythm Style Transfer Without Text Transcriptions

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2106.08519 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2106.08519/

## Key facts

- Cited by 6 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 31 of its 43 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 16 Jun 2021.

## Builds on (most cited first, 30 of 31)

- [Attention Is All You Need](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1706.03762/) (2017)
- [WaveNet: A Generative Model for Raw Audio](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1609.03499/) (2016)
- [Group Normalization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1803.08494/) (2018)
- [StarGAN: Unified Generative Adversarial Networks for Multi-Domain Image-to-Image Translation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1711.09020/) (2017)
- [On Layer Normalization in the Transformer Architecture](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2002.04745/) (2020)
- [Style Tokens: Unsupervised Style Modeling, Control and Transfer in End-to-End Speech Synthesis](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1803.09017/) (2018)
- [Joint CTC-Attention based End-to-End Speech Recognition using Multi-task Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1609.06773/) (2016)
- [AUTOVC: Zero-Shot Voice Style Transfer with Only Autoencoder Loss](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1905.05879/) (2019)
- [Towards End-to-End Prosody Transfer for Expressive Speech Synthesis with Tacotron](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1803.09047/) (2018)
- [Unsupervised Speech Decomposition via Triple Information Bottleneck](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2004.11284/) (2020)
- [One-shot Voice Conversion by Separating Speaker and Content Representations with Instance Normalization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1904.05742/) (2019)
- [StarGAN-VC: Non-parallel many-to-many voice conversion with star generative adversarial networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1806.02169/) (2018)
- [The Emotional Voices Database: Towards Controlling the Emotion Dimension in Voice Generation Systems](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1806.09514/) (2018)
- [Voice Conversion from Non-parallel Corpora Using Variational Auto-encoder](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1610.04019/) (2016)
- [Mellotron: Multispeaker expressive voice synthesis by conditioning on rhythm, pitch and global style tokens](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1910.11997/) (2019)
- [Voice Conversion from Unaligned Corpora using Variational Autoencoding Wasserstein Generative Adversarial Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1704.00849/) (2017)
- [StarGAN-VC2: Rethinking Conditional Methods for StarGAN-Based Voice Conversion](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1907.12279/) (2019)
- [F0-consistent many-to-many non-parallel voice conversion via conditional autoencoder](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2004.07370/) (2020)
- [Parallel-Data-Free Voice Conversion Using Cycle-Consistent Adversarial Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1711.11293/) (2017)
- [Blow: a single-scale hyperconditioned flow for non-parallel raw-audio voice conversion](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1906.00794/) (2019)
- [Transforming Spectrum and Prosody for Emotional Voice Conversion with Non-Parallel Training Data](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2002.00198/) (2020)
- [Multi-target Voice Conversion without Parallel Data by Adversarially Learning Disentangled Audio Representations](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1804.02812/) (2018)
- [CHiVE: Varying Prosody in Speech Synthesis with a Linguistically Driven Dynamic Hierarchical Conditional Variational Network](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1905.07195/) (2019)
- [Parrotron: An End-to-End Speech-to-Speech Conversion Model and its Applications to Hearing-Impaired Speech and Speech Separation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1904.04169/) (2019)
- [VAW-GAN for Disentanglement and Recomposition of Emotional Elements in Speech](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2011.02314/) (2020)
- [Voice Impersonation using Generative Adversarial Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1802.06840/) (2018)
- [Towards Unsupervised Speech Recognition and Synthesis with Quantized Speech Representation Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1910.12729/) (2019)
- [Unsupervised Singing Voice Conversion](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1904.06590/) (2019)
- [Unsupervised Representation Disentanglement using Cross Domain Features and Adversarial Learning in Variational Autoencoder based Voice Conversion](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2001.07849/) (2020)
- [Self-Expressing Autoencoders for Unsupervised Spoken Term Discovery](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2007.13033/) (2020)

## Built on by (most cited first, 6 of 6)

- [Textless Speech Emotion Conversion using Discrete and Decomposed Representations](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2111.07402/) (2021)
- [Nonparallel Emotional Voice Conversion For Unseen Speaker-Emotion Pairs Using Dual Domain Adversarial Network & Virtual Domain Pairing](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2302.10536/) (2023)
- [Rhythm Modeling for Voice Conversion](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2307.06040/) (2023)
- [Enhancing Zero-Shot Many to Many Voice Conversion with Self-Attention VAE](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2203.16037/) (2022)
- [CycleFlow: Purify Information Factors by Cycle Loss](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2110.09928/) (2021)
- [MetaSpeech: Speech Effects Switch Along with Environment for Metaverse](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2210.13811/) (2022)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Prosody plays an important role in characterizing the style of a speaker or an emotion, but most non-parallel voice or emotion style transfer algorithms do not convert any prosody information. Two major components of prosody are pitch and rhythm. Disentangling the prosody information, particularly the rhythm component, from the speech is challenging because it involves breaking the synchrony between the input speech and the disentangled speech representation. As a result, most existing prosody style transfer algorithms would need to rely on some form of text transcriptions to identify the content information, which confines their application to high-resource languages only. Recently, SpeechSplit has made sizeable progress towards unsupervised prosody style transfer, but it is unable to extract high-level global prosody style in an unsupervised manner. In this paper, we propose AutoPST, which can disentangle global prosody style from speech without relying on any text transcriptions. AutoPST is an Autoencoder-based Prosody Style Transfer framework with a thorough rhythm removal module guided by the self-expressive representation learning. Experiments on different style transfer tasks show that AutoPST can effectively convert prosody that correctly reflects the styles of the target domains.