GrainSpeech: Less Context, More Detail for Compact Speech Synthesis
Compact acoustic models face a challenging quality-capacity trade-off. We investigate two factors in this regime: encoder context and Mel-spectrogram supervision. A receptive-field-scaling study shows that expanding self-attention beyond 15 phonemes provides no consistent gains in pitch, energy, or duration prediction. Guided by this finding, we introduce a fixed-receptive-field convolutional encoder that reduces the respective prediction errors by 36.0%, 17.3%, and 3.4%. We further show that directly transferring image-domain gradient-variance supervision restores fine-scale variation but degrades predicted quality, motivating a Mel-specific formulation with axis-specific gradients, overlapping local statistics, and log-domain variance matching. GrainSpeech contains only 264.8K parameters and achieves 17.9x real-time Mel generation on a microcontroller (MCU), while attaining UTMOS scores comparable to substantially larger models with less than 1.5% of their parameters. Source code and demos are available at https://github.com/lab-emi/GrainSpeech.