Quantitative Acoustic Profiling of Zubeen Garg's Humming: Temporal Patterning and Spectral Balance

Vocal humming occupies a distinctive position in Indian popular music as an emotive bridge linking melody, memory, and mood. Zubeen Garg's characteristic humming style, noted for its fluidity and expressive warmth, invites systematic investigation of what acoustically defines its appeal. This study presents a quantitative acoustic profiling of Garg's humming, focusing on how measurable voice parameters contribute to its distinct sonic character. A detailed set of temporal, spectral, and timbral features was extracted, including jitter, shimmer, harmonic-to-noise ratio, spectral centroid, rolloff, tilt, roughness, and Mel-frequency cepstral coefficients (MFCCs). The analyses reveal characteristic temporal patterns (mean jitter ≈ 0.34, shimmer ≈ 0.18). Statistical comparisons show highly significant differences in fundamental frequency between Garg's humming and singing (P < 0.01) and in jitter between his humming and other singers' humming (P < 0.01). Multiple MFCCs also showed significant distinctions (P < 0.05), indicating limited timbral differentiation in harmonic structure. Spectral features showed non-significant trends toward lower centroid (P ≈ 0.11) and elevated roughness (P ≈ 0.06). These results indicate that a subset of temporal and timbral features contributes to an acoustic profile associated with Garg's humming. While no perceptual testing was undertaken, interpretations are grounded in established psychoacoustic literature linking acoustic measures to perceived attributes such as tonal warmth and vocal steadiness. Within this interpretive framework, the findings suggest that Garg's humming exhibits an acoustically measurable combination of selected temporal and spectral characteristics that may be associated with its perceived resonant quality.