Cross-Cultural Bias in Mel-Scale Representations: Evidence and Alternatives from Speech and Music
Modern audio systems universally employ mel-scale representations derived from 1940s Western psychoacoustic studies, potentially encoding cultural biases that create systematic performance disparities. We present a comprehensive evaluation of cross-cultural bias in audio front-ends, comparing mel-scale features with learnable alternatives (LEAF, SincNet) and psychoacoustic variants (ERB, Bark, CQT) across speech recognition (11 languages), music analysis (6 collections), and European acoustic scene classification (10 European cities). Our controlled experiments isolate front-end contributions while holding architecture and training protocols minimal and constant. Results demonstrate that ...
| Authors | Shivam Chauhan, Ajay Pundhir |
|---|---|
| Primary category | cs.SD |
| Published | 12 April 2026 |
| Last updated at source | 12 April 2026 |
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