Opera singers learn the International Phonetic Alphabet in order to perfectly pronounce foreign languages without having any idea how to speak those languages.
In the music department at my university the vocalists had to take two different foreign language classes for this reason, and they were _supposed_ to learn the meaning of everything they sang so they could capture the feeling of the song. Bullshitting your way through those kinds of inflections is the voice undergrad's version of slapping a paper together the night before a deadline.
Hmm. Is IPA sufficiently nuanced to represent speech as pronounced by a native speaker without the leeway that would permit a non-native accent?
Put another way, it was my impression that IPA was coarse grained enough to permit at least some different accents to be represented by the same IPA "spelling".
Opera singer here. IPA is indeed as coarse grained as you described in the latter sentence. Accents can definitely leak through. Practically speaking most opera singers do not use it, and are expected to take two or three romance languages in college. Accents tend to be ironed out mechanically because you want uniformity (when singing in a chorus) and good projection of the phonemes onstage.
