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Universidad Complutense de Madrid

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Representative Papers

Soprano voices in opera seria: a corpus-based inquiry into eighteenth-century vocal types

Aug 05, 2026

This study investigates whether composers of eighteenth-century Italian serious opera tailored aria composition according to the gender of dramatic characters and the biological sex of singers. Drawing on a corpus of approximately 1,700 arias, the research employs music information retrieval techniques alongside interpretable supervised learning methods—specifically ridge logistic regression—to construct statistical models that quantify relationships among vocal type, character gender, and musical features. The analysis reveals, for the first time at scale, that character gender significantly shapes musical style: arias for male characters exhibit wider pitch ranges and larger melodic intervals, whereas those for female characters favor higher tessituras and greater melodic stability. In contrast, singer sex exerts only a negligible influence, indicating that compositional strategies were primarily driven by dramatic role rather than performers’ physiological attributes.

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Latest Papers

Soprano voices in opera seria: a corpus-based inquiry into eighteenth-century vocal types

Aug 05, 2026

This study investigates whether composers of eighteenth-century Italian serious opera tailored aria composition according to the gender of dramatic characters and the biological sex of singers. Drawing on a corpus of approximately 1,700 arias, the research employs music information retrieval techniques alongside interpretable supervised learning methods—specifically ridge logistic regression—to construct statistical models that quantify relationships among vocal type, character gender, and musical features. The analysis reveals, for the first time at scale, that character gender significantly shapes musical style: arias for male characters exhibit wider pitch ranges and larger melodic intervals, whereas those for female characters favor higher tessituras and greater melodic stability. In contrast, singer sex exerts only a negligible influence, indicating that compositional strategies were primarily driven by dramatic role rather than performers’ physiological attributes.

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