RefineGAN: Universally Generating Waveform Better than Ground Truth with Highly Accurate Pitch and Intensity Responses

Most GAN(Generative Adversarial Network)-based approaches towards high-fidelity waveform generation heavily rely on discriminators to improve their performance. However, the over-use of this GAN method introduces much uncertainty into the generation process and often result in mismatches of pitch and intensity, which is fatal when it comes to sensitive using cases such as singing voice synthesis(SVS). To address this problem, we propose RefineGAN, a high-fidelity neural vocoder with faster-than-real-time generation capability, and focused on the robustness, pitch and intensity accuracy, and full-band audio generation. We employed a pitch-guided refine architecture with a multi-scale spectrogram-based loss function to help stabilize the training process and maintain the robustness of the neural vocoder while using the GAN-based training method. Audio generated using this method shows a better performance in subjective tests when compared with the ground-truth audio. This result shows that the fidelity is even improved during the waveform reconstruction by eliminating defects produced by the speaker and the recording procedure. Moreover, a further study shows that models trained on a specified type of data can perform on totally unseen language and unseen speaker identically well. Generated sample pairs are provided on https://timedomain-tech.github.io/refinegan/.