Frequency Domain Variants of Velvet Noise and Their Application to Speech Processing and Synthesis

Hideki Kawahara, Ken-Ichi Sakakibara, Masanori Morise, Hideki Banno, Tomoki Toda and Toshio Irino

Abstract:

We propose a new excitation source signal for VOCODERs and an all-pass impulse response for post-processing of synthetic sounds and pre-processing of natural sounds for data-augmentation. The proposed signals are variants of velvet noise, which is a sparse discrete signal consisting of a few non-zero (1 or -1) elements and sounds smoother than Gaussian white noise. One of the proposed variants, FVN (Frequency domain Velvet Noise) applies the procedure to generate a velvet noise on the cyclic frequency domain of DFT (Discrete Fourier Transform). Then, by smoothing the generated signal to design the phase of an all-pass filter followed by inverse Fourier transform yields the proposed FVN. Temporally variable frequency weighted mixing of FVN generated by frozen and shuffled random number provides a unified excitation signal which can span from random noise to a repetitive pulse train. The other variant, which is an all-pass impulse response, significantly reduces “buzzy” impression of VOCODER output by filtering. Finally, we will discuss applications of the proposed signal for watermarking and psychoacoustic research.

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Cite as: Kawahara, H., Sakakibara, K., Morise, M., Banno, H., Toda, T., Irino, T. (2018) Frequency Domain Variants of Velvet Noise and Their Application to Speech Processing and Synthesis. Proc. Interspeech 2018, 2027-2031, DOI: 10.21437/Interspeech.2018-43.

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BiBTeX Entry:

@inproceedings{Kawahara2018,
author={Hideki Kawahara and Ken-Ichi Sakakibara and Masanori Morise and Hideki Banno and Tomoki Toda and Toshio Irino},
title={Frequency Domain Variants of Velvet Noise and Their Application to Speech Processing and Synthesis},
year=2018,
booktitle={Proc. Interspeech 2018},
pages={2027--2031},
doi={10.21437/Interspeech.2018-43},
url={http://dx.doi.org/10.21437/Interspeech.2018-43} }