Mid-attribute speaker generation using optimal-transport-based interpolation of Gaussian mixture models

Abstract: In this paper, we propose a method for intermediating multiple speakers' attributes and diversifying their voice characteristics in ``speaker generation,'' an emerging task that aims to synthesize a nonexistent speaker's naturally sounding voice. The conventional TacoSpawn-based speaker generation method represents the distributions of speaker embeddings by Gaussian mixture models (GMMs) conditioned with speaker attributes. Although this method enables the sampling of various speakers from the speaker-attribute-aware GMMs, it is not yet clear whether the learned distributions can represent speakers with an intermediate attribute (i.e., mid-attribute). To this end, we propose an optimal-transport-based method that interpolates the learned GMMs to generate nonexistent speakers with mid-attribute (e.g., gender-neutral) voices. We empirically validate our method and evaluate the naturalness of synthetic speech and the controllability of two speaker attributes: gender and language fluency. The evaluation results show that our method can control the generated speakers' attributes by a continuous scalar value without statistically significant degradation of speech naturalness.