Ruiqi Li


2024

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TCSinger: Zero-Shot Singing Voice Synthesis with Style Transfer and Multi-Level Style Control
Yu Zhang | Ziyue Jiang | Ruiqi Li | Changhao Pan | Jinzheng He | Rongjie Huang | Chuxin Wang | Zhou Zhao
Proceedings of the 2024 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing

Zero-shot singing voice synthesis (SVS) with style transfer and style control aims to generate high-quality singing voices with unseen timbres and styles (including singing method, emotion, rhythm, technique, and pronunciation) from audio and text prompts. However, the multifaceted nature of singing styles poses a significant challenge for effective modeling, transfer, and control. Furthermore, current SVS models often fail to generate singing voices rich in stylistic nuances for unseen singers. To address these challenges, we introduce TCSinger, the first zero-shot SVS model for style transfer across cross-lingual speech and singing styles, along with multi-level style control. Specifically, TCSinger proposes three primary modules: 1) the clustering style encoder employs a clustering vector quantization model to stably condense style information into a compact latent space; 2) the Style and Duration Language Model (S&D-LM) concurrently predicts style information and phoneme duration, which benefits both; 3) the style adaptive decoder uses a novel mel-style adaptive normalization method to generate singing voices with enhanced details. Experimental results show that TCSinger outperforms all baseline models in synthesis quality, singer similarity, and style controllability across various tasks, including zero-shot style transfer, multi-level style control, cross-lingual style transfer, and speech-to-singing style transfer.

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Self-Supervised Singing Voice Pre-Training towards Speech-to-Singing Conversion
Ruiqi Li | Rongjie Huang | Yongqi Wang | Zhiqing Hong | Zhou Zhao
Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: ACL 2024

Speech-to-singing voice conversion (STS) task always suffers from data scarcity, because it requires paired speech and singing data. Compounding this issue are the challenges of content-pitch alignment and the suboptimal quality of generated outputs, presenting significant hurdles in STS research. This paper presents SVPT, an STS approach boosted by a self-supervised singing voice pre-training model.We leverage spoken language model techniques to tackle the rhythm alignment problem and the in-context learning capability to achieve zero-shot conversion. We adopt discrete-unit random resampling and pitch corruption strategies, enabling training with unpaired singing data and thus mitigating the issue of data scarcity. SVPT also serves as an effective backbone for singing voice synthesis (SVS), offering insights into scaling up SVS models. Experimental results indicate that SVPT delivers notable improvements in both STS and SVS endeavors. Audio samples are available at https://speech2sing.github.io.

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Prompt-Singer: Controllable Singing-Voice-Synthesis with Natural Language Prompt
Yongqi Wang | Ruofan Hu | Rongjie Huang | Zhiqing Hong | Ruiqi Li | Wenrui Liu | Fuming You | Tao Jin | Zhou Zhao
Proceedings of the 2024 Conference of the North American Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics: Human Language Technologies (Volume 1: Long Papers)

Recent singing-voice-synthesis (SVS) methods have achieved remarkable audio quality and naturalness, yet they lack the capability to control the style attributes of the synthesized singing explicitly. We propose Prompt-Singer, the first SVS method that enables attribute controlling on singer gender, vocal range and volume with natural language. We adopt a model architecture based on a decoder-only transformer with a multi-scale hierarchy, and design a range-melody decoupled pitch representation that enables text-conditioned vocal range control while keeping melodic accuracy. Furthermore, we explore various experiment settings, including different types of text representations, text encoder fine-tuning, and introducing speech data to alleviate data scarcity, aiming to facilitate further research. Experiments show that our model achieves favorable controlling ability and audio quality. Audio samples are available at http://prompt-singer.github.io .

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Text-to-Song: Towards Controllable Music Generation Incorporating Vocal and Accompaniment
Zhiqing Hong | Rongjie Huang | Xize Cheng | Yongqi Wang | Ruiqi Li | Fuming You | Zhou Zhao | Zhimeng Zhang
Proceedings of the 62nd Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 1: Long Papers)

A song is a combination of singing voice and accompaniment. However, existing works focus on singing voice synthesis and music generation independently. Little attention was paid to exploring song synthesis. In this work, we propose a novel task called Text-to-Song synthesis which incorporates both vocal and accompaniment generation. We develop Melodist, a two-stage text-to-song method that consists of singing voice synthesis (SVS) and vocal-to-accompaniment (V2A) synthesis. Melodist leverages tri-tower contrastive pretraining to learn more effective text representation for controllable V2A synthesis. A Chinese song dataset mined from a music website is built to alleviate data scarcity for our research. The evaluation results on our dataset demonstrate that Melodist can synthesize songs with comparable quality and style consistency. Audio samples can be found in https://text2songMelodist.github.io/Sample/.

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Robust Singing Voice Transcription Serves Synthesis
Ruiqi Li | Yu Zhang | Yongqi Wang | Zhiqing Hong | Rongjie Huang | Zhou Zhao
Proceedings of the 62nd Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 1: Long Papers)

Note-level Automatic Singing Voice Transcription (AST) converts singing recordings into note sequences, facilitating the automatic annotation of singing datasets for Singing Voice Synthesis (SVS) applications. Current AST methods, however, struggle with accuracy and robustness when used for practical annotation. This paper presents ROSVOT, the first robust AST model that serves SVS, incorporating a multi-scale framework that effectively captures coarse-grained note information and ensures fine-grained frame-level segmentation, coupled with an attention-based pitch decoder for reliable pitch prediction. We also established a comprehensive annotation-and-training pipeline for SVS to test the model in real-world settings. Experimental findings reveal that the proposed model achieves state-of-the-art transcription accuracy with either clean or noisy inputs. Moreover, when trained on enlarged, automatically annotated datasets, the SVS model outperforms its baseline, affirming the capability for practical application. Audio samples are available at https://rosvot.github.io. Codes can be found at https://github.com/RickyL-2000/ROSVOT.

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Speech-to-Speech Translation with Discrete-Unit-Based Style Transfer
Yongqi Wang | Bai Jionghao | Rongjie Huang | Ruiqi Li | Zhiqing Hong | Zhou Zhao
Proceedings of the 62nd Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 4: Student Research Workshop)

Direct speech-to-speech translation (S2ST) with discrete self-supervised representations has achieved remarkable accuracy, but is unable to preserve the speaker timbre of the source speech. Meanwhile, the scarcity of high-quality speaker-parallel data poses a challenge for learning style transfer during translation. We design an S2ST pipeline with style-transfer capability on the basis of discrete self-supervised speech representations and codec units. The acoustic language model we introduce for style transfer leverages self-supervised in-context learning, acquiring style transfer ability without relying on any speaker-parallel data, thereby overcoming data scarcity. By using extensive training data, our model achieves zero-shot cross-lingual style transfer on previously unseen source languages. Experiments show that our model generates translated speeches with high fidelity and speaker similarity. Audio samples are available at http://stylelm.github.io/ .

2023

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AlignSTS: Speech-to-Singing Conversion via Cross-Modal Alignment
Ruiqi Li | Rongjie Huang | Lichao Zhang | Jinglin Liu | Zhou Zhao
Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: ACL 2023

The speech-to-singing (STS) voice conversion task aims to generate singing samples corresponding to speech recordings while facing a major challenge: the alignment between the target (singing) pitch contour and the source (speech) content is difficult to learn in a text-free situation. This paper proposes AlignSTS, an STS model based on explicit cross-modal alignment, which views speech variance such as pitch and content as different modalities. Inspired by the mechanism of how humans will sing the lyrics to the melody, AlignSTS: 1) adopts a novel rhythm adaptor to predict the target rhythm representation to bridge the modality gap between content and pitch, where the rhythm representation is computed in a simple yet effective way and is quantized into a discrete space; and 2) uses the predicted rhythm representation to re-align the content based on cross-attention and conducts a cross-modal fusion for re-synthesize. Extensive experiments show that AlignSTS achieves superior performance in terms of both objective and subjective metrics. Audio samples are available at https://alignsts.github.io.

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EDeR: Towards Understanding Dependency Relations Between Events
Ruiqi Li | Patrik Haslum | Leyang Cui
Proceedings of the 2023 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing

Relation extraction is a crucial task in natural language processing (NLP) and information retrieval (IR). Previous work on event relation extraction mainly focuses on hierarchical, temporal and causal relations. Such relationships consider two events to be independent in terms of syntax and semantics, but they fail to recognize the interdependence between events. To bridge this gap, we introduce a human-annotated Event Dependency Relation dataset (EDeR). The annotation is done on a sample of documents from the OntoNotes dataset, which has the additional benefit that it integrates with existing, orthogonal, annotations of this dataset. We investigate baseline approaches for EDeR’s event dependency relation prediction. We show that recognizing such event dependency relations can further benefit critical NLP tasks, including semantic role labelling and co-reference resolution.