Structure Across Voices: Comparing acoustic-event type accumulation and sequence dependence across four vocal repertoires using frozen audio encoders

arXiv:2609.16612v1 Announce Type: cross
Abstract: Vocal repertoires can differ in acoustic-event type accumulation and temporal organization, yet direct comparison is difficult because corpora use different native events and unequal amounts of sequence. We compare sperm whale codas, human speech phones, Bengalese finch syllables, and common marmoset calls using the same frozen-audio-encoder procedure while matching event count and local sequence opportunity. Whale shows the fastest type accumulation; Finch shows the strongest immediate dependence and repeated-subsequence recurrence. Physically interpretable acoustics recover complementary parts of this profile, continuous analyses without clustering support broad Whale acoustic coverage, and source- and position-preserving nulls retain both Finch order effects. Extending predictive context shifts the comparison toward Whale. Thus repertoire differences depend on the acoustic property and temporal scale measured rather than forming a single hierarchy.

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Structure Across Voices: Comparing acoustic-event type accumulation and sequence dependence across four vocal repertoires using frozen audio encoders