Year: 2026
Type: preprint
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.
Source: arXiv (Cornell University)
Authors: Kim, Hayoon, Lee, Kyogu
Institution: Seoul National University
Topic: Music and Audio Processing
Subfield: Signal Processing
Field: Computer Science
Domain: Physical Sciences
Open Access status: green
Awards: G2947324332, G6120464043, G8978267545
OpenAlex ID: W7204962066
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