Improve Cross-Lingual Text-To-Speech Synthesis on Monolingual Corpora with Pitch Contour Information

Cross-lingual text-to-speech (TTS) synthesis on monolingual corpora is still a challenging task, especially when many kinds of languages are involved. In this paper, we improve the cross-lingual TTS model on monolingual corpora with pitch contour information. We propose a method to obtain pitch contour sequences for different languages without manual annotation, and extend the Tacotron-based TTS model with the proposed Pitch Contour Extraction (PCE) module. Our experimental results show that the proposed approach can effectively improve the naturalness and consistency of synthesized mixed-lingual utterances.