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Description
This study compares acoustic profiles of choral, popular and amateur singing using a controlled corpus of 800 sustained-vowel recordings produced by 20 singers on eight pitches of a C-major scale. Studio recordings were analysed using intonation, vibrato, perturbation, and selected formant-related and spectral features. The aim of the study was to identify interpretable acoustic features that vary across styles under controlled phonetic and pitch conditions. As each singer belonged to one style group, comparisons used singer-level median feature values. The clearest style-related difference was observed for absolute intonation error, which differed significantly between groups and was lowest in choral singing: 8.1 cents, compared with 19.7 cents in popular and 25.2 cents in amateur singing. Other descriptors (amplitude stability and vibrato-related) showed consistent but weaker tendencies. Median shimmer was lowest in choral singing, 0.127 dB, compared with 0.163 dB in amateur and 0.224 dB in popular singing. Median vibrato frequency was also higher in choral singing (5.07 Hz) than in popular (4.77 Hz) and amateur singing (4.63 Hz), but these differences did not reach statistical significance after singer-level correction. These findings support the search for interpretable acoustic features that differentiate singing styles and describe stylistic aspects of vocal technique in an interpretable way. The results suggest that controlled sustained-vowel recordings can reveal style-related tendencies, particularly in pitch accuracy, amplitude stability and vibrato-related features, with weaker evidence for spectral features, while also demonstrating that such differences should be interpreted with caution due to substantial singer-specific variability and partial overlap between style groups.