Cross-Cultural Bias in Mel-Scale Representations: Evidence and Alternatives from Speech and Music

arXiv:2604.10503v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: 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