Vocal Music under Phoneme-Conditional Analysis

• URL: http://arxiv.org/abs/2608.30823v1
• Date: Mon, 31 Aug 2026 14:03:36 GMT
• Title: Vocal Music under Phoneme-Conditional Analysis
• Abstract summary: We use phoneme-conditional analysis to study the acoustic effect of typologically distinctive phonemes.<n>Across nine typologically diverse languages and thousands of songs, we measure effects along five acoustic dimensions.<n>Our findings suggest that phonological structure leaves measurable traces in how each language is sung.
• Score: 29.619759892670306
• License: http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/
• 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.

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