Improving Audio Generation with Visual Enhanced Caption

Generative models have shown significant achievements in audio generation tasks. However, existing models struggle with complex and detailed prompts, leading to potential performance degradation. We hypothesize that this problem stems from the low quality and relatively small quantity of training data. In this work, we aim to create a large-scale audio dataset with rich captions for improving audio generation models. We develop an automated pipeline to generate detailed captions for audio-visual datasets by transforming predicted visual captions, audio captions, and tagging labels into comprehensive descriptions using a Large Language Model (LLM). We introduce Sound-VECaps, a dataset comprising 1.66M high-quality audio-caption pairs with enriched details including audio event orders, occurred places and environment information. We demonstrate that training with Sound-VECaps significantly enhances the capability of text-to-audio generation models to comprehend and generate audio from complex input prompts, improving overall system performance. Furthermore, we conduct ablation studies of Sound-VECaps across several audio-language tasks, suggesting its potential in advancing audio-text representation learning. Our dataset and models are available online.

Seed-TTS: A Family of High-Quality Versatile Speech Generation Models

We introduce Seed-TTS, a family of large-scale autoregressive text-to-speech (TTS) models capable of generating speech that is virtually indistinguishable from human speech. Seed-TTS serves as a foundation model for speech generation and excels in speech in-context learning, achieving performance in speaker similarity and naturalness that matches ground truth human speech in both objective and subjective evaluations. With fine-tuning, we achieve even higher subjective scores across these metrics. Seed-TTS offers superior controllability over various speech attributes such as emotion and is capable of generating highly expressive and diverse speech for speakers in the wild. Furthermore, we propose a self-distillation method for speech factorization, as well as a reinforcement learning approach to enhance model robustness, speaker similarity, and controllability. We additionally present a non-autoregressive (NAR) variant of the Seed-TTS model, named $\text{Seed-TTS}_\text{DiT}$, which utilizes a fully diffusion-based architecture. Unlike previous NAR-based TTS systems, $\text{Seed-TTS}_\text{DiT}$ does not depend on pre-estimated phoneme durations and performs speech generation through end-to-end processing. We demonstrate that this variant achieves comparable performance to the language model-based variant and showcase its effectiveness in speech editing. We encourage readers to listen to demos at \url{https://bytedancespeech.github.io/seedtts_tech_report}.

KaraTuner: Towards end to end natural pitch correction for singing voice in karaoke

An automatic pitch correction system typically includes several stages, such as pitch extraction, deviation estimation, pitch shift processing, and cross-fade smoothing. However, designing these components with strategies often requires domain expertise and they are likely to fail on corner cases. In this paper, we present KaraTuner, an end-to-end neural architecture that predicts pitch curve and resynthesizes the singing voice directly from the tuned pitch and vocal spectrum extracted from the original recordings. Several vital technical points have been introduced in KaraTuner to ensure pitch accuracy, pitch naturalness, timbre consistency, and sound quality. A feed-forward Transformer is employed in the pitch predictor to capture long-term dependencies in the vocal spectrum and musical note. We also develop a pitch-controllable vocoder base on a novel source-filter block and the Fre-GAN architecture. KaraTuner obtains a higher preference than the rule-based pitch correction approach through A/B tests, and perceptual experiments show that the proposed vocoder achieves significant advantages in timbre consistency and sound quality compared with the parametric WORLD vocoder and phase vocoder.