iSTFTNet: Fast and Lightweight Mel-Spectrogram Vocoder Incorporating Inverse Short-Time Fourier Transform

TL;DR

iSTFTNet is a fast, lightweight mel-spectrogram vocoder that incorporates inverse STFT to improve efficiency and speech quality in text-to-speech systems.

Contribution

It introduces a novel approach replacing parts of the neural vocoder with inverse STFT, reducing computational cost and leveraging time-frequency structures.

Findings

Models became faster and more lightweight.

Maintained reasonable speech quality.

Applicable to multiple HiFi-GAN variants.

Abstract

In recent text-to-speech synthesis and voice conversion systems, a mel-spectrogram is commonly applied as an intermediate representation, and the necessity for a mel-spectrogram vocoder is increasing. A mel-spectrogram vocoder must solve three inverse problems: recovery of the original-scale magnitude spectrogram, phase reconstruction, and frequency-to-time conversion. A typical convolutional mel-spectrogram vocoder solves these problems jointly and implicitly using a convolutional neural network, including temporal upsampling layers, when directly calculating a raw waveform. Such an approach allows skipping redundant processes during waveform synthesis (e.g., the direct reconstruction of high-dimensional original-scale spectrograms). By contrast, the approach solves all problems in a black box and cannot effectively employ the time-frequency structures existing in a mel-spectrogram. We thus propose iSTFTNet, which replaces some output-side layers of the mel-spectrogram vocoder with the inverse short-time Fourier transform (iSTFT) after sufficiently reducing the frequency dimension using upsampling layers, reducing the computational cost from black-box modeling and avoiding redundant estimations of high-dimensional spectrograms. During our experiments, we applied our ideas to three HiFi-GAN variants and made the models faster and more lightweight with a reasonable speech quality. Audio samples are available at https://www.kecl.ntt.co.jp/people/kaneko.takuhiro/projects/istftnet/.