VFNet: A Convolutional Architecture for Accent Classification

Understanding accent is an issue which can derail any human-machine interaction. Accent classification makes this task easier by identifying the accent being spoken by a person so that the correct words being spoken can be identified by further processing, since same noises can mean entirely different words in different accents of the same language. In this paper, we present VFNet (Variable Filter Net), a convolutional neural network (CNN) based architecture which captures a hierarchy of features to beat the previous benchmarks of accent classification, through a novel and elegant technique of applying variable filter sizes along the frequency band of the audio utterances.

Autoencoder Based Architecture For Fast & Real Time Audio Style Transfer

Recently, there has been great interest in the field of audio style transfer, where a stylized audio is generated by imposing the style of a reference audio on the content of a target audio. We improve on the current approaches which use neural networks to extract the content and the style of the audio signal and propose a new autoencoder based architecture for the task. This network generates a stylized audio for a content audio in a single forward pass. The proposed network architecture proves to be advantageous over the quality of audio produced and the time taken to train the network. The network is experimented on speech signals to confirm the validity of our proposal.