# Text-Free Prosody-Aware Generative Spoken Language Modeling

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2109.03264 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2109.03264/

## Key facts

- Cited by 119 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 23 of its 49 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 7 Sep 2021.

## Builds on (most cited first, 23 of 23)

- [Adam: A Method for Stochastic Optimization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1412.6980/) (2014)
- [Language Models are Few-Shot Learners](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2005.14165/) (2020)
- [Representation Learning with Contrastive Predictive Coding](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1807.03748/) (2018)
- [Neural Discrete Representation Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1711.00937/) (2017)
- [wav2vec 2.0: A Framework for Self-Supervised Learning of Speech Representations](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2006.11477/) (2020)
- [HuBERT: Self-Supervised Speech Representation Learning by Masked Prediction of Hidden Units](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2106.07447/) (2021)
- [WaveNet: A Generative Model for Raw Audio](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1609.03499/) (2016)
- [HiFi-GAN: Generative Adversarial Networks for Efficient and High Fidelity Speech Synthesis](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2010.05646/) (2020)
- [FastSpeech 2: Fast and High-Quality End-to-End Text to Speech](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2006.04558/) (2020)
- [SUPERB: Speech processing Universal PERformance Benchmark](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2105.01051/) (2021)
- [Tacotron: Towards End-to-End Speech Synthesis](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1703.10135/) (2017)
- [Libri-Light: A Benchmark for ASR with Limited or No Supervision](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1912.07875/) (2019)
- [Generative Spoken Language Modeling from Raw Audio](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2102.01192/) (2021)
- [Speech Resynthesis from Discrete Disentangled Self-Supervised Representations](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2104.00355/) (2021)
- [Mockingjay: Unsupervised Speech Representation Learning with Deep Bidirectional Transformer Encoders](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1910.12638/) (2019)
- [An Unsupervised Autoregressive Model for Speech Representation Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1904.03240/) (2019)
- [FastPitch: Parallel Text-to-speech with Pitch Prediction](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2006.06873/) (2020)
- [Robust wav2vec 2.0: Analyzing Domain Shift in Self-Supervised Pre-Training](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2104.01027/) (2021)
- [DeCoAR 2.0: Deep Contextualized Acoustic Representations with Vector Quantization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2012.06659/) (2020)
- [Data Augmenting Contrastive Learning of Speech Representations in the Time Domain](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2007.00991/) (2020)
- [The Emotional Voices Database: Towards Controlling the Emotion Dimension in Voice Generation Systems](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1806.09514/) (2018)
- [Unsupervised Cross-Domain Singing Voice Conversion](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2008.02830/) (2020)
- [Unsupervised Learning of Disentangled Speech Content and Style Representation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2010.12973/) (2020)

## Built on by (most cited first, 30 of 119)

- [High Fidelity Neural Audio Compression](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2210.13438/) (2022)
- [AudioLM: a Language Modeling Approach to Audio Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2209.03143/) (2022)
- [Simple and Controllable Music Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2306.05284/) (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)
- [Self-Supervised Speech Representation Learning: A Review](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2205.10643/) (2022)
- [SpeechT5: Unified-Modal Encoder-Decoder Pre-Training for Spoken Language Processing](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2110.07205/) (2021)
- [Generative Spoken Dialogue Language Modeling](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2203.16502/) (2022)
- [Spirit LM: Interleaved Spoken and Written Language Model](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2402.05755/) (2024)
- [Textless Speech-to-Speech Translation on Real Data](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2112.08352/) (2021)
- [VoiceCraft: Zero-Shot Speech Editing and Text-to-Speech in the Wild](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2403.16973/) (2024)
- [On The Landscape of Spoken Language Models: A Comprehensive Survey](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2504.08528/) (2025)
- [Textually Pretrained Speech Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2305.13009/) (2023)
- [Spoken Question Answering and Speech Continuation Using Spectrogram-Powered LLM](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2305.15255/) (2023)
- [Recent Advances in Speech Language Models: A Survey](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2410.03751/) (2024)
- [Guided-TTS: A Diffusion Model for Text-to-Speech via Classifier Guidance](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2111.11755/) (2021)
- [Language Model Can Listen While Speaking](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2408.02622/) (2024)
- [Generative Pre-training for Speech with Flow Matching](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2310.16338/) (2023)
- [Masked Audio Generation using a Single Non-Autoregressive Transformer](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2401.04577/) (2024)
- [Advancing Large Language Models to Capture Varied Speaking Styles and Respond Properly in Spoken Conversations](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2402.12786/) (2024)
- [Enhanced Direct Speech-to-Speech Translation Using Self-supervised Pre-training and Data Augmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2204.02967/) (2022)
- [Recent Advances in Discrete Speech Tokens: A Review](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2502.06490/) (2025)
- [Self-supervised language learning from raw audio: Lessons from the Zero Resource Speech Challenge](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2210.15759/) (2022)
- [An Overview of Affective Speech Synthesis and Conversion in the Deep Learning Era](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2210.03538/) (2022)
- [SpeechPrompt v2: Prompt Tuning for Speech Classification Tasks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2303.00733/) (2023)
- [Scaling Properties of Speech Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2404.00685/) (2024)
- [How BPE Affects Memorization in Transformers](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2110.02782/) (2021)
- [Textless Speech Emotion Conversion using Discrete and Decomposed Representations](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2111.07402/) (2021)
- [BabySLM: language-acquisition-friendly benchmark of self-supervised spoken language models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2306.01506/) (2023)
- [textless-lib: a Library for Textless Spoken Language Processing](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2202.07359/) (2022)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Speech pre-training has primarily demonstrated efficacy on classification tasks, while its capability of generating novel speech, similar to how GPT-2 can generate coherent paragraphs, has barely been explored. Generative Spoken Language Modeling (GSLM) citeLakhotia2021 is the only prior work addressing the generative aspects of speech pre-training, which replaces text with discovered phone-like units for language modeling and shows the ability to generate meaningful novel sentences. Unfortunately, despite eliminating the need of text, the units used in GSLM discard most of the prosodic information. Hence, GSLM fails to leverage prosody for better comprehension, and does not generate expressive speech. In this work, we present a prosody-aware generative spoken language model (pGSLM). It is composed of a multi-stream transformer language model (MS-TLM) of speech, represented as discovered unit and prosodic feature streams, and an adapted HiFi-GAN model converting MS-TLM outputs to waveforms. We devise a series of metrics for prosody modeling and generation, and re-use metrics from GSLM for content modeling. Experimental results show that the pGSLM can utilize prosody to improve both prosody and content modeling, and also generate natural, meaningful, and coherent speech given a spoken prompt. Audio samples can be found at https://speechbot.github.io/pgslm. Codes and models are available at https://github.com/pytorch/fairseq/tree/main/examples/textlessnlp/pgslm.