Vocal Music under Phoneme-Conditional Analysis

Abstract:The vocal music of each language carries a distinctive sonic identity, even without instrumental accompaniment. We ask whether these differences are measurable and traceable to specific phonemes. To tackle this question, we introduce phoneme-conditional analysis, which isolates the acoustic effect of typologically distinctive phonemes by comparing marker syllables against matched non-marker controls within the same song, holding singer, melody, and genre constant. Across nine typologically diverse languages and thousands of songs, we measure effects along five acoustic dimensions. Song-level profiles built from these effects identify the language of an unaccompanied vocal at 85.5% balanced accuracy in a nine-way classification with folds grouped by artist; whether the separability arises by accumulation of the phoneme-local effects themselves is left open. Our findings suggest that phonological structure leaves systematic and measurable traces in how each language is sung.

Sound (cs.SD); Computation and Language (cs.CL)

arXiv:2608.30823 [cs.SD]

(or arXiv:2608.30823v1 [cs.SD] for this version)

https://doi.org/10.48550/arXiv.2608.30823 Focus to learn more arXiv-issued DOI via DataCite (pending registration)

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