An Exploratory Study on Perceptual Spaces of the Singing Voice

TL;DR

This study explores how singing voice timbre varies across different singers, genders, and registers using perceptual ratings and statistical analysis, providing insights into vocal timbre perception and useful data for machine learning applications.

Contribution

It introduces a comprehensive analysis of singing voice timbral spaces across various conditions, highlighting the effects of gender, register, and participant perception on timbre similarity.

Findings

Timbre spaces vary with singer, gender, and register.

Similarity scores correlate with participants' instrumental skills.

Subjectivity influences perceptual ratings and clustering outcomes.

Abstract

Sixty participants provided dissimilarity ratings between various singing techniques. Multidimensional scaling, class averaging and clustering techniques were used to analyse timbral spaces and how they change between different singers, genders and registers. Clustering analysis showed that ground-truth similarity and silhouette scores that were not significantly different between gender or register conditions, while similarity scores were positively correlated with participants' instrumental abilities and task comprehension. Participant feedback showed how a revised study design might mitigate noise in our data, leading to more detailed statistical results. Timbre maps and class distance analysis showed us which singing techniques remained similar to one another across gender and register conditions. This research provides insight into how the timbre space of singing changes under different conditions, highlights the subjectivity of perception between participants, and provides generalised timbre maps for regularisation in machine learning.