A Dataset for Automatic Vocal Mode Classification

The Complete Vocal Technique (CVT) is a school of singing developed in the past decades by Cathrin Sadolin et al.. CVT groups the use of the voice into so called vocal modes, namely Neutral, Curbing, Overdrive and Edge. Knowledge of the desired vocal mode can be helpful for singing students. Automatic classification of vocal modes can thus be important for technology-assisted singing teaching. Previously, automatic classification of vocal modes has been attempted without major success, potentially due to a lack of data. Therefore, we recorded a novel vocal mode dataset consisting of sustained vowels recorded from four singers, three of which professional singers with more than five years of CVT-experience. The dataset covers the entire vocal range of the subjects, totaling 3,752 unique samples. By using four microphones, thereby offering a natural data augmentation, the dataset consists of more than 13,000 samples combined. An annotation was created using three CVT-experienced annotators, each providing an individual annotation. The merged annotation as well as the three individual annotations come with the published dataset. Additionally, we provide some baseline classification results. The best balanced accuracy across a 5-fold cross validation of 81.3\,\% was achieved with a ResNet18. The dataset can be downloaded under https://zenodo.org/records/14276415.