Speaking Style Conversion With Discrete Self-Supervised Units

Voice Conversion (VC) is the task of making a spoken utterance by one speaker sound as if uttered by a different speaker, while keeping other aspects like content unchanged. Current VC methods, focus primarily on spectral features like timbre, while ignoring the unique speaking style of people which often impacts prosody. In this study, we introduce a method for converting not only the timbre, but also prosodic information (i.e., rhythm and pitch changes) to those of the target speaker. The proposed approach is based on a pretrained, self-supervised, model for encoding speech to discrete units, which make it simple, effective, and easy to optimise. We consider the many-to-many setting with no paired data. We introduce a suite of quantitative and qualitative evaluation metrics for this setup, and empirically demonstrate the proposed approach is significantly superior to the evaluated baselines. Code and samples can be found under https://pages.cs.huji.ac.il/adiyoss-lab/dissc/ .