FastFit: Towards Real-Time Iterative Neural Vocoder by Replacing U-Net
  Encoder With Multiple STFTs
Won Jang Dan Lim Heayoung Park
This paper presents FastFit, a novel neural vocoder architecture that
replaces the U-Net encoder with multiple short-time Fourier transforms (STFTs)
to achieve faster generation rates without sacrificing sample quality. We
replaced each encoder block with an STFT, with parameters equal to the temporal
resolution of each decoder block, leading to the skip connection. FastFit
reduces the number of parameters and the generation time of the model by almost
half while maintaining high fidelity. Through objective and subjective
evaluations, we demonstrated that the proposed model achieves nearly twice the
generation speed of baseline iteration-based vocoders while maintaining high
sound quality. We further showed that FastFit produces sound qualities similar
to those of other baselines in text-to-speech evaluation scenarios, including
multi-speaker and zero-shot text-to-speech.