Translingual Resonance in Popular Music: A Comparative Study of Analogue, Platform-Mediated, and AI-Assisted Circulation

Abstract

Music can support affective engagement across linguistic boundaries, but the mechanisms and infrastructures of that engagement remain dispersed across sociolinguistics, translation studies, music cognition, and platform research. This conceptual article compares three regimes of cross-lingual musical circulation: analogue and broadcast distribution, platform-mediated circulation, and emerging AI-assisted production. It synthesises scholarship on prosody, multilingual composition, fan translation, recommender systems, and singing-voice synthesis to develop a music-specific account of translingual resonance: sustained aesthetic and emotional engagement with music in a language that a listener does not fully understand. The article argues that such resonance is relational rather than purely psychological, arising through interactions among musical-linguistic form, listener knowledge, technological mediation, and interpretive communities. It also proposes translingual expropriation as an ethical category for cases involving non-consensual voice or style simulation, opaque data provenance, misattribution, asymmetric benefit, loss of cultural agency, or displacement of originating musicians. Because the article is based on selected cases and conceptual synthesis rather than a representative corpus or audience study, both concepts are presented as preliminary frameworks for future reception, corpus, and ethnographic research.