What is wrong with my training of single speaker in portuguese, lots of noise

I am getting lots of noise in the synthesized speech.
Here is the tensorboard of the machine in amazon http://ec2-3-84-75-204.compute-1.amazonaws.com:6006/#scalars
Audio is from a male actor recorded at studio quality, 10 hours, resampled to 44.100hz

I didn’t tune mel_fmin nor mel_fmax are they necessary?

Here is the config.json used
{
“model”: “Tacotron2”,
“run_name”: “ljspeech”,
“run_description”: “tacotron2”,

// AUDIO PARAMETERS
"audio":{
    // stft parameters
    "num_freq": 513,         // number of stft frequency levels. Size of the linear spectogram frame.
    "win_length": 1024,      // stft window length in ms.
    "hop_length": 256,       // stft window hop-lengh in ms.
    "frame_length_ms": null, // stft window length in ms.If null, 'win_length' is used.
    "frame_shift_ms": null,  // stft window hop-lengh in ms. If null, 'hop_length' is used.

    // Audio processing parameters
    "sample_rate": 44100,   // DATASET-RELATED: wav sample-rate. If different than the original data, it is resampled.
    "preemphasis": 0.0,     // pre-emphasis to reduce spec noise and make it more structured. If 0.0, no -pre-emphasis.
    "ref_level_db": 20,     // reference level db, theoretically 20db is the sound of air.

    // Silence trimming
    "do_trim_silence": false,// enable trimming of slience of audio as you load it. LJspeech (false), TWEB (false), Nancy (true)
    "trim_db": 60,          // threshold for timming silence. Set this according to your dataset.

    // Griffin-Lim
    "power": 1.5,           // value to sharpen wav signals after GL algorithm.
    "griffin_lim_iters": 60,// #griffin-lim iterations. 30-60 is a good range. Larger the value, slower the generation.

    // MelSpectrogram parameters
    "num_mels": 80,         // size of the mel spec frame.
    "mel_fmin": 0.0,        // minimum freq level for mel-spec. ~50 for male and ~95 for female voices. Tune for dataset!!
    "mel_fmax": 8000.0,     // maximum freq level for mel-spec. Tune for dataset!!

    // Normalization parameters
    "signal_norm": true,    // normalize spec values. Mean-Var normalization if 'stats_path' is defined otherwise range normalization defined by the other params.
    "min_level_db": -100,   // lower bound for normalization
    "symmetric_norm": true, // move normalization to range [-1, 1]
    "max_norm": 4.0,        // scale normalization to range [-max_norm, max_norm] or [0, max_norm]
    "clip_norm": true,      // clip normalized values into the range.
    "stats_path": null    // DO NOT USE WITH MULTI_SPEAKER MODEL. scaler stats file computed by 'compute_statistics.py'. If it is defined, mean-std based notmalization is used and other normalization params are ignored
},

// VOCABULARY PARAMETERS
// if custom character set is not defined,
// default set in symbols.py is used
// "characters":{
//     "pad": "_",
//     "eos": "~",
//     "bos": "^",
//     "characters": "ABCDEFGHIJKLMNOPQRSTUVWXYZabcdefghijklmnopqrstuvwxyz!'(),-.:;? ",
//     "punctuations":"!'(),-.:;? ",
//     "phonemes":"iyɨʉɯuɪʏʊeøɘəɵɤoɛœɜɞʌɔæɐaɶɑɒᵻʘɓǀɗǃʄǂɠǁʛpbtdʈɖcɟkɡqɢʔɴŋɲɳnɱmʙrʀⱱɾɽɸβfvθðszʃʒʂʐçʝxɣχʁħʕhɦɬɮʋɹɻjɰlɭʎʟˈˌːˑʍwɥʜʢʡɕʑɺɧɚ˞ɫ"
// },

// DISTRIBUTED TRAINING
"distributed":{
    "backend": "nccl",
    "url": "tcp:\/\/localhost:54321"
},

"reinit_layers": [],    // give a list of layer names to restore from the given checkpoint. If not defined, it reloads all heuristically matching layers.

// TRAINING
"batch_size": 32,       // Batch size for training. Lower values than 32 might cause hard to learn attention. It is overwritten by 'gradual_training'.
"eval_batch_size":16,
"r": 7,                 // Number of decoder frames to predict per iteration. Set the initial values if gradual training is enabled.
"gradual_training": [[0, 7, 64], [1, 5, 64], [50000, 3, 32], [130000, 2, 32], [290000, 1, 32]], //set gradual training steps [first_step, r, batch_size]. If it is null, gradual training is disabled. For Tacotron, you might need to reduce the 'batch_size' as you proceeed.
"loss_masking": true,         // enable / disable loss masking against the sequence padding.
"ga_alpha": 10.0,        // weight for guided attention loss. If > 0, guided attention is enabled.

// VALIDATION
"run_eval": true,
"test_delay_epochs": 10,  //Until attention is aligned, testing only wastes computation time.
"test_sentences_file": null,  // set a file to load sentences to be used for testing. If it is null then we use default english sentences.

// OPTIMIZER
"noam_schedule": false,        // use noam warmup and lr schedule.
"grad_clip": 1.0,              // upper limit for gradients for clipping.
"epochs": 1000,                // total number of epochs to train.
"lr": 0.0001,                  // Initial learning rate. If Noam decay is active, maximum learning rate.
"wd": 0.000001,                // Weight decay weight.
"warmup_steps": 4000,          // Noam decay steps to increase the learning rate from 0 to "lr"
"seq_len_norm": false,         // Normalize eash sample loss with its length to alleviate imbalanced datasets. Use it if your dataset is small or has skewed distribution of sequence lengths.

// TACOTRON PRENET
"memory_size": -1,             // ONLY TACOTRON - size of the memory queue used fro storing last decoder predictions for auto-regression. If < 0, memory queue is disabled and decoder only uses the last prediction frame.
"prenet_type": "original",     // "original" or "bn".
"prenet_dropout": true,        // enable/disable dropout at prenet.

// ATTENTION
"attention_type": "original",  // 'original' or 'graves'
"attention_heads": 4,          // number of attention heads (only for 'graves')
"attention_norm": "sigmoid",   // softmax or sigmoid. Suggested to use softmax for Tacotron2 and sigmoid for Tacotron.
"windowing": false,            // Enables attention windowing. Used only in eval mode.
"use_forward_attn": false,     // if it uses forward attention. In general, it aligns faster.
"forward_attn_mask": false,    // Additional masking forcing monotonicity only in eval mode.
"transition_agent": false,     // enable/disable transition agent of forward attention.
"location_attn": true,         // enable_disable location sensitive attention. It is enabled for TACOTRON by default.
"bidirectional_decoder": false,  // use https://arxiv.org/abs/1907.09006. Use it, if attention does not work well with your dataset.

// STOPNET
"stopnet": true,               // Train stopnet predicting the end of synthesis.
"separate_stopnet": true,      // Train stopnet seperately if 'stopnet==true'. It prevents stopnet loss to influence the rest of the model. It causes a better model, but it trains SLOWER.

// TENSORBOARD and LOGGING
"print_step": 25,       // Number of steps to log traning on console.
"print_eval": false,     // If True, it prints intermediate loss values in evalulation.
"save_step": 10000,      // Number of training steps expected to save traninpg stats and checkpoints.
"checkpoint": true,     // If true, it saves checkpoints per "save_step"
"tb_model_param_stats": false,     // true, plots param stats per layer on tensorboard. Might be memory consuming, but good for debugging.

// DATA LOADING
"text_cleaner": "phoneme_cleaners",
"enable_eos_bos_chars": false, // enable/disable beginning of sentence and end of sentence chars.
"num_loader_workers": 4,        // number of training data loader processes. Don't set it too big. 4-8 are good values.
"num_val_loader_workers": 4,    // number of evaluation data loader processes.
"batch_group_size": 0,  //Number of batches to shuffle after bucketing.
"min_seq_len": 6,       // DATASET-RELATED: minimum text length to use in training
"max_seq_len": 153,     // DATASET-RELATED: maximum text length

// PATHS
"output_path": "/home/ubuntu/TTS/Models/LJSpeech/",

// PHONEMES
"phoneme_cache_path": "/media/erogol/data_ssd2/mozilla_us_phonemes_3",  // phoneme computation is slow, therefore, it caches results in the given folder.
"use_phonemes": false,           // use phonemes instead of raw characters. It is suggested for better pronounciation.
"phoneme_language": "pt-br",     // depending on your target language, pick one from  https://github.com/bootphon/phonemizer#languages

// MULTI-SPEAKER and GST
"use_speaker_embedding": false,     // use speaker embedding to enable multi-speaker learning.
"style_wav_for_test": null,          // path to style wav file to be used in TacotronGST inference.
"use_gst": false,       // TACOTRON ONLY: use global style tokens

// DATASETS
"datasets":   // List of datasets. They all merged and they get different speaker_ids.
    [
        {
            "name": "ljspeech",
            "path": "/home/ubuntu/TTS/datasets/",
            "meta_file_train": "metadata_train.csv",
            "meta_file_val": "metadata_val.csv"
        }
    ]

}

I usually set the recommendations for mel_fmin.

Resampled to 44.1khz? What was it recorded at?

Hi baconator, at 48Khz and 44.1Khz we resampled all of them to 44.1khz.
The noise is so bad that I am suspecting of anything related to the processing of the audio files, including normalization parameters maybe I should disable them because the dataset is already normalized.

The sound processing attributes do not seem to be compatible with each other. Why do you have a num_freq of 513? Also the win_length and hop_length look small for 44100 sound. The model is doing bad, yes. At 140k steps, if the dataset is clean, it should already be relatively good in synthesized speech.

Hi George,

I started with the defaults, can you point me to some documentation on how to better tune these values based on sampling rate? or suggest better ones for 44.100khz?

Best regards

No idea, sorry :slight_smile: Never trained on 44

I do wonder if it’s worth trying at for example 22kHz first, as that’s what I’ve seen used most by others. If you can crack that, then maybe go back to looking at 44kHz.

Another thing: how promptly do your recordings start / stop? I see you have do_trim_silence set to false. Isn’t necessarily a problem, will depend on dataset.

1 Like

Yes Neil that is a good idea, I will try that.
Regarding do_trim_silence I have prepared the dataset with sox splitting the audio by silence already.

Best regards

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Now retraining with default values and 22.050hz and “mel_fmin”: 40.0
http://ec2-54-198-15-166.compute-1.amazonaws.com:6006/#scalars

Hi @nmstoker, retried training with the dataset resampled to 22050hz, noise is gone but synthesized audio is somewhat lacking high frequencies and apparently with audio amplitude out of range (warning messages) can I disable audio normalization on config.json?
http://ec2-54-198-15-166.compute-1.amazonaws.com:6006/#scalars

I am looking at the normalisation myself at the moment. I haven’t tried completely turning off the normalisation before, but if you look in the config file there are various settings relating to this, including:

“signal_norm”: true

So you could try setting that to False along with not populating stats_path with a file (ie leave it as null). As they say, Your Mileage May Vary! :slightly_smiling_face:

@alvaro.antelo, are you able to share your dataset?

Hi, @synesthesiam, I’m sorry but no, at this time, the dataset is property of the company I work for.

1 Like

OK, thank you. There appears to be another dataset available here: https://github.com/Edresson/TTS-Portuguese-Corpus

@synesthesiam we are developing another dataset with a voice actor that is not part of the company and that one can be made public, I will post it here when it’s finished. It is Brazillian Portuguese. Best regards.

Thanks, @alvaro.antelo

Besides a text to speech model, I’m always on the look out for Portuguese speech data to train a better (Kaldi) speech to text model for Rhasspy.