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Full-Band LPCNet: A Real-Time Neural Vocoder for 48 kHz Audio With a CPU

2021; Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers; Volume: 9; Linguagem: Inglês

10.1109/access.2021.3089565

2169-3536

Keisuke Matsubara, Takuma Okamoto, Ryoichi Takashima, Tetsuya Takiguchi, Tomoki Toda, Yoshinori Shiga, Hisashi Kawai,

Music and Audio Processing

This paper investigates a real-time neural speech synthesis system on CPUs that can synthesize high-fidelity 48 kHz speech waveforms to cover the entire frequency range audible by human beings. Although most previous studies on 48 kHz speech synthesis have used traditional source-filter vocoders or a WaveNet vocoder for waveform generation, they have some drawbacks regarding synthesis quality or inference speed. LPCNet was proposed as a real-time neural vocoder with a mobile CPU but its sampling frequency is still only 16 kHz. In this paper, we propose a Full-band LPCNet to synthesize high-fidelity 48 kHz speech waveforms with a CPU by introducing some simple but effective modifications to the conventional LPCNet. We then evaluate the synthesis quality using both normal speech and a singing voice. The results of these experiments demonstrate that the proposed Full-band LPCNet is the only neural vocoder that can synthesize high-quality 48 kHz speech waveforms while maintaining real-time capability with a CPU.