# A unified one-shot prosody and speaker conversion system with self-supervised discrete speech units

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2211.06535 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2211.06535/

## Key facts

- Cited by 3 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 24 of its 30 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 12 Nov 2022.

## Builds on (most cited first, 24 of 24)

- [Layer Normalization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1607.06450/) (2016)
- [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)
- [HiFi-GAN: Generative Adversarial Networks for Efficient and High Fidelity Speech Synthesis](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2010.05646/) (2020)
- [Least Squares Generative Adversarial Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1611.04076/) (2016)
- [LibriTTS: A Corpus Derived from LibriSpeech for Text-to-Speech](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1904.02882/) (2019)
- [AUTOVC: Zero-Shot Voice Style Transfer with Only Autoencoder Loss](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1905.05879/) (2019)
- [Dawn of the transformer era in speech emotion recognition: closing the valence gap](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2203.07378/) (2022)
- [Seen and Unseen emotional style transfer for voice conversion with a new emotional speech dataset](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2010.14794/) (2020)
- [Text-Free Prosody-Aware Generative Spoken Language Modeling](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2109.03264/) (2021)
- [CREPE: A Convolutional Representation for Pitch Estimation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1802.06182/) (2018)
- [Unsupervised Speech Decomposition via Triple Information Bottleneck](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2004.11284/) (2020)
- [Neural Analysis and Synthesis: Reconstructing Speech from Self-Supervised Representations](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2110.14513/) (2021)
- [VQMIVC: Vector Quantization and Mutual Information-Based Unsupervised Speech Representation Disentanglement for One-shot Voice Conversion](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2106.10132/) (2021)
- [ESPnet-TTS: Unified, Reproducible, and Integratable Open Source End-to-End Text-to-Speech Toolkit](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1910.10909/) (2019)
- [F0-consistent many-to-many non-parallel voice conversion via conditional autoencoder](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2004.07370/) (2020)
- [VQVC+: One-Shot Voice Conversion by Vector Quantization and U-Net architecture](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2006.04154/) (2020)
- [textless-lib: a Library for Textless Spoken Language Processing](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2202.07359/) (2022)
- [SpeechSplit 2.0: Unsupervised speech disentanglement for voice conversion Without tuning autoencoder Bottlenecks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2203.14156/) (2022)
- [Visualizing Data using GTSNE](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2108.01301/) (2021)
- [S3PRL-VC: Open-source Voice Conversion Framework with Self-supervised Speech Representations](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2110.06280/) (2021)
- [Fine-grained style control in Transformer-based Text-to-speech Synthesis](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2110.06306/) (2021)
- [Speech Representation Disentanglement with Adversarial Mutual Information Learning for One-shot Voice Conversion](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2208.08757/) (2022)
- [Unsupervised End-to-End Learning of Discrete Linguistic Units for Voice Conversion](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1905.11563/) (2019)

## Built on by (most cited first, 3 of 3)

- [Speaking Style Conversion in the Waveform Domain Using Discrete Self-Supervised Units](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2212.09730/) (2022)
- [vec2wav 2.0: Advancing Voice Conversion via Discrete Token Vocoders](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2409.01995/) (2024)
- [Towards Inclusive ASR: Investigating Voice Conversion for Dysarthric Speech Recognition in Low-Resource Languages](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2505.14874/) (2025)

## Abstract (arXiv)

We present a unified system to realize one-shot voice conversion (VC) on the pitch, rhythm, and speaker attributes. Existing works generally ignore the correlation between prosody and language content, leading to the degradation of naturalness in converted speech. Additionally, the lack of proper language features prevents these systems from accurately preserving language content after conversion. To address these issues, we devise a cascaded modular system leveraging self-supervised discrete speech units as language representation. These discrete units provide duration information essential for rhythm modeling. Our system first extracts utterance-level prosody and speaker representations from the raw waveform. Given the prosody representation, a prosody predictor estimates pitch, energy, and duration for each discrete unit in the utterance. A synthesizer further reconstructs speech based on the predicted prosody, speaker representation, and discrete units. Experiments show that our system outperforms previous approaches in naturalness, intelligibility, speaker transferability, and prosody transferability. Code and samples are publicly available.