Contemporary Ghanaian popular singing combines European and traditional Ghanaian influences. We hypothesize that access to technology embedded with equal temperament catalyzed a progressive alignment of Ghanaian singing with equal-tempered scales over time. To test this, we study the Ghanaian singer Daddy Lumba, whose work spans from the earliest Ghanaian electronic style in the late 1980s to the present. Studying a singular musician as a case study allows us to refine our analysis without over-interpreting the findings. We curated a collection of his songs, distributed between 1989 and 2016, to extract F0 values from isolated vocals. We used Gaussian mixture modeling (GMM) to approximate each song's scale and found that the pitch variance has been decreasing over time. We also determined whether the GMM components follow the arithmetic relationships observed in equal-tempered scales, and observed that Daddy Lumba's singing better aligns with equal temperament in recent years. Together, results reveal the impact of exposure to equal-tempered scales, resulting in lessened microtonal content in Daddy Lumba's singing. Our study highlights a potential vulnerability of Ghanaian musical scales and implies a need for research that maps and archives singing styles.

翻译：当代加纳流行演唱融合了欧洲与传统加纳音乐元素。我们假设，嵌入平均律技术的普及随时间渐进地推动了加纳演唱与平均律音阶的对齐。为验证这一假设，我们研究了加纳歌手Daddy Lumba——其作品跨越了从20世纪80年代末最早的加纳电子风格至今的时期。通过以单一音乐家为案例研究，我们得以精炼分析而不过度解读结果。我们整理了他1989年至2016年间发布的歌曲集，从分离的人声中提取基频（F0）值。采用高斯混合模型（GMM）近似每首歌的音阶后发现，音高方差随时间递减。我们还检验了GMM成分是否遵循平均律音阶中的算术关系，观察到Daddy Lumba近年来的演唱与平均律对齐得更紧密。综合而言，结果揭示了接触平均律音阶的影响——导致其演唱中微分音成分减少。本研究凸显了加纳音阶可能面临的脆弱性，并暗示了需开展绘制与存档演唱风格的研究。