  Automatic transcription of monophonic/polyphonic music is a challenging task
due to the lack of availability of large amounts of transcribed data. In this
paper, we propose a data augmentation method that converts natural speech to
singing voice based on vocoder based speech synthesizer. This approach, called
voice to singing (V2S), performs the voice style conversion by modulating the
F0 contour of the natural speech with that of a singing voice. The V2S model
based style transfer can generate good quality singing voice thereby enabling
the conversion of large corpora of natural speech to singing voice that is
useful in building an E2E lyrics transcription system. In our experiments on
monophonic singing voice data, the V2S style transfer provides a significant
gain (relative improvements of 21%) for the E2E lyrics transcription system. We
also discuss additional components like transfer learning and lyrics based
language modeling to improve the performance of the lyrics transcription
system.
