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Audio-Lyrics Alignment Dataset for Italian Arias

Aligning song lyrics with sung audio is challenging, especially for languages and music styles where annotated datasets are scarce. We address this gap by presenting the first dataset of Italian opera arias annotated with lyrics and time-stamps per word. The dataset comprises of 24 arias drawn from well-known operas of the 18th to 20th centuries with a total audio duration of nearly two hours. We benchmark both music alignment models and speech forced alignment models and show that existing methods face significant challenges on this dataset, with performance dropping by 45% compared to other datasets. Multilingual and speech-based models exhibit relatively better performance on this dataset. We also evaluate few-shot fine-tuning of these models on the new dataset and find that, while it yields only marginal overall improvement, it produces localized gains on specific arias, suggesting that limited exposure helps the model adapt to some patterns but cannot fully overcome differences in language or musical style.