PitchFlower: A flow-based neural audio codec with pitch controllability

Torres, Diego, Roebel, Axel, Obin, Nicolas

arXiv.org Artificial Intelligence 

Our approach enforces disentanglement through a simple perturbation: during training, F0 contours are flattened and randomly shifted, while the true F0 is provided as conditioning. A vector-quantization bottleneck prevents pitch recovery, and a flow-based decoder generates high quality audio. Experiments show that PitchFlower achieves more accurate pitch control than WORLD at much higher audio quality, and outperforms SiFi-GAN in controllability while maintaining comparable quality. Beyond pitch, this framework provides a simple and extensible path toward disentangling other speech attributes.