BemaGANv2: Discriminator Combination Strategies for GAN-based Vocoders in Long-Term Audio Generation

TL;DR

BemaGANv2 introduces innovative discriminator combination strategies and architectural enhancements to improve long-term audio generation quality in GAN-based vocoders, evaluated through comprehensive objective and subjective metrics.

Contribution

It proposes a new discriminator architecture (MED) and evaluates various configurations, advancing the state-of-the-art in long-term audio synthesis with detailed reproducibility.

Findings

Enhanced long-range dependency modeling in audio

Superior performance on objective metrics like FAD and MCD

Improved subjective audio quality in evaluations

Abstract

This paper presents BemaGANv2, an advanced GAN-based vocoder designed for high-fidelity and long-term audio generation, with a focus on systematic evaluation of discriminator combination strategies. Long-term audio generation is critical for applications in Text-to-Music (TTM) and Text-to-Audio (TTA) systems, where maintaining temporal co- herence, prosodic consistency, and harmonic structure over extended durations remains a significant challenge. Built upon the original BemaGAN architecture, BemaGANv2 incorporates major architectural innovations by replacing traditional ResBlocks in the generator with the Anti-aliased Multi-Periodicity composition (AMP) module, which internally applies the Snake activation function to better model periodic structures. In the discriminator framework, we integrate the Multi-Envelope Discriminator (MED), a novel architecture we proposed, to extract rich temporal en- velope features crucial for periodicity detection. Coupled with the Multi-Resolution Discriminator (MRD), this com- bination enables more accurate modeling of long-range dependencies in audio. We systematically evaluate various discriminator configurations, including Multi-Scale Discriminator (MSD) + MED, MSD + MRD, and Multi-Period Discriminator (MPD) + MED + MRD, using objective metrics (Fr\'echet Audio Distance (FAD), Structural Similar- ity Index (SSIM), Pearson Correlation Coefficient (PCC), Mel-Cepstral Distortion (MCD), Multi-Resolution STFT (M-STFT), Periodicity error (Periodicity)) and subjective evaluations (MOS, SMOS). To support reproducibility, we provide detailed architectural descriptions, training configurations, and complete implementation details. The code, pre-trained models, and audio demo samples are available at: https://github.com/dinhoitt/BemaGANv2.