The generalized command response (GCR) model represents intonation as a superposition of muscle responses to spike command signals. We have previously shown that the spikes can be predicted by a two-stage system, consisting of a recurrent neural network and a post-processing procedure, but the responses themselves were fixed dictionary atoms. We propose an end-to-end neural architecture that replaces the dictionary atoms with trainable second-order recurrent elements analogous to recursive filters. We demonstrate gradient stability under modest conditions, and show that the system can be trained by imposing temporal sparsity constraints. Subjective listening tests demonstrate that the system can synthesize intonation with high naturalness, comparable to state-of-the-art acoustic models, and retains the physiological plausibility of the GCR model.
The Generalised Command Response (GCR) model is a timelocal model of intonation that has been shown to lend itself to (cross-language) transfer of emphasis. In order to generalise the model to longer prosodic sequences, we show that it can be driven by a recurrent neural network emulating a spiking neural network. We show that a loss function for error backpropagation can be formulated analogously to that of the Spike Pattern Association Neuron (SPAN) method for spiking networks. The resulting system is able to generate prosody comparable to a state-of-the-art deep neural network implementation, but potentially retaining the transfer capabilities of the GCR model.
scite is a Brooklyn-based organization that helps researchers better discover and understand research articles through Smart Citations–citations that display the context of the citation and describe whether the article provides supporting or contrasting evidence. scite is used by students and researchers from around the world and is funded in part by the National Science Foundation and the National Institute on Drug Abuse of the National Institutes of Health.