Reachable but Not Recognized: Cultural Coverage Gaps in General-Purpose Audio Models for Live Religious Radio

Authors

  • Francesco Mariano Accademia di Belle Arti di Macerata; Conservatorio di Musica "G. B. Martini", Bologna

DOI:

https://doi.org/10.65408/cird795397

Keywords:

Religious Soundscape, Intangible Heritage, Live Web Radio, Audio Machine Learning

Abstract

Live religious radio carries chant, cantillation, preaching, and ritual silence, yet remains largely absent from heritage documentation. This paper establishes live-streamed religious radio as ephemeral intangible heritage and evaluates whether audio models can support its preservation. Over ten days in August 2026, 63 live streams across ten traditions, 21 languages, and 21 countries were monitored from residential and cloud-based locations. Eight sampling rounds produced 4,570 samples from 59 stations. A failure taxonomy distinguishes stream reachability from usable capture: one station appeared live in 99.6% of rounds but never yielded a usable recording because its catalogue entry pointed to a playlist rather than a stream. Model analysis reveals recognition gaps at two levels. Ontologically, 40.3% of Islamic samples were misclassified as ‘Mantra’, the non-Christian devotional vocal category. Representationally, two domain vocabularies remained below a corpus-composition baseline and clustered by acoustic form. These findings show that automated capture can produce preservation gaps and culturally distorted metadata. The paper contributes a reproducible protocol separating stream discovery, capture validation, and recognition quality, enabling institutions to audit preservation and classification.

Author Biography

  • Francesco Mariano, Accademia di Belle Arti di Macerata; Conservatorio di Musica "G. B. Martini", Bologna

    Francesco Mariano is an Italian composer, multimedia artist, and researcher working on computational audio, soundscape, and sonic heritage. He teaches Ear Training for Sound Engineering at the Conservatory of Music "G. B. Martini" in Bologna, and Sound-Space Design and Multimedia Performance Processes and Techniques at the Academy of Fine Arts of Macerata. He has also taught Interaction Design at the Academy of Fine Arts of Catania. He holds a second-level Master in Film and Videogame Music Composition, with a specialisation in AI applied to audio signals, and a first-level Master in Sonic Arts, both from the University of Rome Tor Vergata. He completed a second-level Academic Diploma in Electronic Music at the Conservatory of Piacenza and a Diploma in Double Bass at the Conservatory of Mantua. His creative practice combines electroacoustic and soundscape composition with Max/MSP/Jitter and the Web Audio API, and his sound project "Soglie d'ascolto" was selected for the zero edition of the Biennale del Gran Sasso. He develops Progressive Web Apps for cultural heritage, teaching and research, among them SacredSounds Radio Hub, the catalogue of live religious radio stations on which this article is based. He maintains the open-source soundscape-audio-analysis toolkit and has published two open-access papers on Zenodo, "Soundscape Annotation" and "From Text to Sound". He collaborated with the ITSERR project (PNRR) on interactive applications for the analysis of sacred texts, data sonification and the integration of AI. He is a member of the Europeana Network Association.

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18th-century Bishop’s Chapel, Archibishopric of Lucca. Photo by: Olimpia Niglio, October 2026

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Published

2026-11-08

Issue

Vol. 13 No. 4 (2026): Religious Cultural Heritage: Diagnostics, Documentation and Valorization

Section

Articles

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Copyright (c) 2026 Francesco Mariano

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