EmoSphere-TTS: Emotional Style and Intensity Modeling via Spherical Emotion Vector for Controllable Emotional Text-to-Speech

Deok-Hyeon Cho, Hyung-Seok Oh, Seung-Bin Kim, Sang-Hoon Lee and Seong-Whan Lee

Abstract

Despite rapid advances in the field of emotional text-to-speech (TTS), recent studies primarily focus on mimicking the average style of a particular emotion. As a result, the ability to manipulate speech emotion remains constrained to several predefined labels, compromising the ability to reflect the nuanced variations of emotion. In this paper, we propose EmoSphere-TTS, which synthesizes expressive emotional speech by using a spherical emotion vector to control the emotional style and intensity of the synthetic speech. Without any human annotation, we use the arousal, valence, and dominance pseudo-labels to model the complex nature of emotion via a Cartesian-spherical transformation. Furthermore, we propose a dual conditional adversarial network to improve the quality of generated speech by reflecting the multi-aspect characteristics. The experimental results demonstrate the model’s ability to control emotional style and intensity with high-quality expressive speech.





Overall framework of EmoSphere-TTS

Emotional TTS Quality

Emotion Intensity Controllability

Emotional Style Shift

*Valence: the level of excitement or energy

*Arousal: positivity or negativity of emotion

*Dominance: control level within an emotional state