  Generating synthesised singing voice with models trained on speech data has
many advantages due to the models' flexibility and controllability. However,
since the information about the temporal relationship between segments and
beats are lacking in speech training data, the synthesised singing may sound
off-beat at times. Therefore, the availability of the information on the
temporal relationship between speech segments and music beats is crucial. The
current study investigated the segment-beat synchronisation in singing data,
with hypotheses formed based on the linguistics theories of P-centre and
sonority hierarchy. A Mandarin corpus and an English corpus of professional
singing data were manually annotated and analysed. The results showed that the
presence of musical beats was more dependent on segment duration than sonority.
However, the sonority hierarchy and the P-centre theory were highly related to
the location of beats. Mandarin and English demonstrated cross-linguistic
variations despite exhibiting common patterns.
