  This paper proposes a novel sequence-to-sequence (seq2seq) model with a
musical note position-aware attention mechanism for singing voice synthesis
(SVS). A seq2seq modeling approach that can simultaneously perform acoustic and
temporal modeling is attractive. However, due to the difficulty of the temporal
modeling of singing voices, many recent SVS systems with an
encoder-decoder-based model still rely on explicitly on duration information
generated by additional modules. Although some studies perform simultaneous
modeling using seq2seq models with an attention mechanism, they have
insufficient robustness against temporal modeling. The proposed attention
mechanism is designed to estimate the attention weights by considering the
rhythm given by the musical score. Furthermore, several techniques are also
introduced to improve the modeling performance of the singing voice.
Experimental results indicated that the proposed model is effective in terms of
both naturalness and robustness of timing.
