arXiv subjects

Meiying Melissa Chen

Publications and source records attributed to Meiying Melissa Chen.

3 recordsLinked to original sources

arXiv2026

NouveauVoice: Generating Novel Pseudo Speakers for Voice Anonymization

Advanced neural technologies in speech synthesis and voice conversion (VC) have introduced severe risks to personal privacy, necessitating robust Speaker Anonymization Systems (SAS). Existing SAS approaches modify voice characteristics in the hand-crafted feature space or speaker embedding space, often struggling to provide sufficient identity variance across generated voices. In this paper, we propose NouveauVoice, a novel pseudo-speaker generation framework based on a Hierarchical Deep Variational Autoencoder (NVAE). Integrated as a standalone plug-in module on top of state-of-the-art architectures (FACodec and CosyVoice2), our approach leverages tractable sampling and the Evidence Lower Bound (ELBO) objective to synthesize highly expressive pseudo-speaker embeddings with significantly enhanced speaker diversity. Evaluating our framework under a protocol similar to the VoicePrivacy Challenge alongside Maximum Mean Discrepancy (MMD) analysis, we demonstrate that NouveauVoice achieves strong identity concealment, yielding an Equal Error Rate (EER) exceeding 38% against an automatic speaker verification attacker model. Our system shows a reasonable trade-off between strict anonymity, rich pseudo-speaker diversity, and downstream speech utility, such as intelligibility and emotional expressiveness.

eess.AS↗

arXiv2025

Generating Novel and Realistic Speakers for Voice Conversion

Voice conversion models modify timbre while preserving paralinguistic features, enabling applications like dubbing and identity protection. However, most VC systems require access to target utterances, limiting their use when target data is unavailable or when users desire conversion to entirely novel, unseen voices. To address this, we introduce a lightweight method SpeakerVAE to generate novel speakers for VC. Our approach uses a deep hierarchical variational autoencoder to model the speaker timbre space. By sampling from the trained model, we generate novel speaker representations for voice synthesis in a VC pipeline. The proposed method is a flexible plug-in module compatible with various VC models, without co-training or fine-tuning of the base VC system. We evaluated our approach with state-of-the-art VC models: FACodec and CosyVoice2. The results demonstrate that our method successfully generates novel, unseen speakers with quality comparable to that of the training speakers.

cs.SD↗

arXiv2024

GTR-Voice: Articulatory Phonetics Informed Controllable Expressive Speech Synthesis

Expressive speech synthesis aims to generate speech that captures a wide range of para-linguistic features, including emotion and articulation, though current research primarily emphasizes emotional aspects over the nuanced articulatory features mastered by professional voice actors. Inspired by this, we explore expressive speech synthesis through the lens of articulatory phonetics. Specifically, we define a framework with three dimensions: Glottalization, Tenseness, and Resonance (GTR), to guide the synthesis at the voice production level. With this framework, we record a high-quality speech dataset named GTR-Voice, featuring 20 Chinese sentences articulated by a professional voice actor across 125 distinct GTR combinations. We verify the framework and GTR annotations through automatic classification and listening tests, and demonstrate precise controllability along the GTR dimensions on two fine-tuned expressive TTS models. We open-source the dataset and TTS models.

eess.AS↗