# Make-A-Voice: Unified Voice Synthesis With Discrete Representation

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2305.19269 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2305.19269/

## Key facts

- Cited by 27 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 41 of its 47 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 30 May 2023.

## Builds on (most cited first, 30 of 41)

- [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)
- [fairseq: A Fast, Extensible Toolkit for Sequence Modeling](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1904.01038/) (2019)
- [HiFi-GAN: Generative Adversarial Networks for Efficient and High Fidelity Speech Synthesis](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2010.05646/) (2020)
- [SoundStream: An End-to-End Neural Audio Codec](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2107.03312/) (2021)
- [Neural Codec Language Models are Zero-Shot Text to Speech Synthesizers](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2301.02111/) (2023)
- [data2vec: A General Framework for Self-supervised Learning in Speech, Vision and Language](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2202.03555/) (2022)
- [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)
- [Conditional Variational Autoencoder with Adversarial Learning for End-to-End Text-to-Speech](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2106.06103/) (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)
- [MusicLM: Generating Music From Text](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2301.11325/) (2023)
- [MUSAN: A Music, Speech, and Noise Corpus](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1510.08484/) (2015)
- [YourTTS: Towards Zero-Shot Multi-Speaker TTS and Zero-Shot Voice Conversion for everyone](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2112.02418/) (2021)
- [BigVGAN: A Universal Neural Vocoder with Large-Scale Training](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2206.04658/) (2022)
- [Speech Resynthesis from Discrete Disentangled Self-Supervised Representations](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2104.00355/) (2021)
- [NaturalSpeech 2: Latent Diffusion Models are Natural and Zero-Shot Speech and Singing Synthesizers](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2304.09116/) (2023)
- [Speak, Read and Prompt: High-Fidelity Text-to-Speech with Minimal Supervision](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2302.03540/) (2023)
- [Speak Foreign Languages with Your Own Voice: Cross-Lingual Neural Codec Language Modeling](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2303.03926/) (2023)
- [DiffSinger: Singing Voice Synthesis via Shallow Diffusion Mechanism](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2105.02446/) (2021)
- [Generative Spoken Dialogue Language Modeling](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2203.16502/) (2022)
- [Seen and Unseen emotional style transfer for voice conversion with a new emotional speech dataset](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2010.14794/) (2020)
- [Textless Speech-to-Speech Translation on Real Data](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2112.08352/) (2021)
- [HiFi-Codec: Group-residual Vector quantization for High Fidelity Audio Codec](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2305.02765/) (2023)
- [Meta-StyleSpeech : Multi-Speaker Adaptive Text-to-Speech Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2106.03153/) (2021)
- [InstructTTS: Modelling Expressive TTS in Discrete Latent Space with Natural Language Style Prompt](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2301.13662/) (2023)
- [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)
- [End-to-End Adversarial Text-to-Speech](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2006.03575/) (2020)

## Built on by (most cited first, 27 of 27)

- [NaturalSpeech 3: Zero-Shot Speech Synthesis with Factorized Codec and Diffusion Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2403.03100/) (2024)
- [VALL-E 2: Neural Codec Language Models are Human Parity Zero-Shot Text to Speech Synthesizers](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2406.05370/) (2024)
- [SpeechX: Neural Codec Language Model as a Versatile Speech Transformer](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2308.06873/) (2023)
- [WavMark: Watermarking for Audio Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2308.12770/) (2023)
- [HierSpeech++: Bridging the Gap between Semantic and Acoustic Representation of Speech by Hierarchical Variational Inference for Zero-shot Speech Synthesis](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2311.12454/) (2023)
- [Next Token Prediction Towards Multimodal Intelligence: A Comprehensive Survey](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2412.18619/) (2024)
- [SimpleSpeech: Towards Simple and Efficient Text-to-Speech with Scalar Latent Transformer Diffusion Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2406.02328/) (2024)
- [Towards Controllable Speech Synthesis in the Era of Large Language Models: A Systematic Survey](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2412.06602/) (2024)
- [SEF-VC: Speaker Embedding Free Zero-Shot Voice Conversion with Cross Attention](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2312.08676/) (2023)
- [ControlSpeech: Towards Simultaneous and Independent Zero-shot Speaker Cloning and Zero-shot Language Style Control](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2406.01205/) (2024)
- [SimpleSpeech 2: Towards Simple and Efficient Text-to-Speech with Flow-based Scalar Latent Transformer Diffusion Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2408.13893/) (2024)
- [Text-to-Song: Towards Controllable Music Generation Incorporating Vocals and Accompaniment](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2404.09313/) (2024)
- [Prompt-Singer: Controllable Singing-Voice-Synthesis with Natural Language Prompt](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2403.11780/) (2024)
- [TransVIP: Speech to Speech Translation System with Voice and Isochrony Preservation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2405.17809/) (2024)
- [Speech-to-Speech Translation with Discrete-Unit-Based Style Transfer](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2309.07566/) (2023)
- [Speech Synthesis From Continuous Features Using Per-Token Latent Diffusion](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2410.16048/) (2024)
- [UniMoE-Audio: Unified Speech and Music Generation with Dynamic-Capacity MoE](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2510.13344/) (2025)
- [SpeechComposer: Unifying Multiple Speech Tasks with Prompt Composition](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2401.18045/) (2024)
- [CoMelSinger: Discrete Token-Based Zero-Shot Singing Synthesis With Structured Melody Control and Guidance](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2509.19883/) (2025)
- [An Empirical Study of Speech Language Models for Prompt-Conditioned Speech Synthesis](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2403.12402/) (2024)
- [The X-LANCE Technical Report for Interspeech 2024 Speech Processing Using Discrete Speech Unit Challenge](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2404.06079/) (2024)
- [DiTReducio: A Training-Free Acceleration for DiT-Based TTS via Progressive Calibration](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2509.09748/) (2025)
- [U-Codec: Ultra Low Frame-rate Neural Speech Codec for Fast High-fidelity Speech Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2510.16718/) (2025)
- [Degrading Voice: A Comprehensive Overview of Robust Voice Conversion Through Input Manipulation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2512.06304/) (2025)
- [Tutti: Expressive Multi-Singer Synthesis via Structure-Level Timbre Control and Vocal Texture Modeling](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2602.08233/) (2026)
- [Noisy-Channel Minimum Bayes Risk Decoding](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2607.05198/) (2026)
- [Alignment-Free Text-Audiobox for Voice Dubbing and Full-Duplex Dialogue Synthesis](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2609.03992/) (2026)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Various applications of voice synthesis have been developed independently despite the fact that they generate "voice" as output in common. In addition, the majority of voice synthesis models currently rely on annotated audio data, but it is crucial to scale them to self-supervised datasets in order to effectively capture the wide range of acoustic variations present in human voice, including speaker identity, emotion, and prosody. In this work, we propose Make-A-Voice, a unified framework for synthesizing and manipulating voice signals from discrete representations. Make-A-Voice leverages a "coarse-to-fine" approach to model the human voice, which involves three stages: 1) semantic stage: model high-level transformation between linguistic content and self-supervised semantic tokens, 2) acoustic stage: introduce varying control signals as acoustic conditions for semantic-to-acoustic modeling, and 3) generation stage: synthesize high-fidelity waveforms from acoustic tokens. Make-A-Voice offers notable benefits as a unified voice synthesis framework: 1) Data scalability: the major backbone (i.e., acoustic and generation stage) does not require any annotations, and thus the training data could be scaled up. 2) Controllability and conditioning flexibility: we investigate different conditioning mechanisms and effectively handle three voice synthesis applications, including text-to-speech (TTS), voice conversion (VC), and singing voice synthesis (SVS) by re-synthesizing the discrete voice representations with prompt guidance. Experimental results demonstrate that Make-A-Voice exhibits superior audio quality and style similarity compared with competitive baseline models. Audio samples are available at https://Make-A-Voice.github.io