Beijing Opera Percussion Patterns

This page provides additional resources about percussion patterns in Beijing Opera and serves as an accompanying page for [1]. The page provides additional information, scores and audio examples for commonly occuring percussion patterns. Please use the page in conjunction with [1].

[1] Ajay Srinivasamurthy, Rafael Caro Repetto, Harshavardhan Sundar, Xavier Serra, "Transcription and Recognition of Syllable based Percussion Patterns: The Case of Beijing Opera," in Proceedings of the 15th International Society for Music Information Retrieval (ISMIR) Conference, Taipei, Taiwan, Oct 2014

There is a dataset containing audio examples of the percussion patterns described below. For the dataset, please see: http://compmusic.upf.edu/bopp-dataset

For some audio examples of individual percussion instruments used in Beijing Opera, please see: http://compmusic.upf.edu/examples-percussion-bo

The scores for percussion patterns is shown with staff notation below have been adapted from:

W. Mu(穆文义). Jingju dajiyue jiqiao yu lianxi: yanzou jiaocheng 京剧打击乐技巧与练习：演奏教程 (Technique and practice of Beijing opera percussion music: a performance course). Renmin yinyue chubanshe, Beijing, 2007

The scores show the staff notation followed by the syllabic representation for the pattern. The syllabic representation is shown on three lines:

Top row: The representation with the full set of syllables (chinese characters)

Middle row: The representation with the full set of syllables (pinyin)

Last row: The representation with the reduced set of syllable groups, as introduced in [1].

For the symbols used, please see Table 1 of [1].

Please note that Man changchui and shanchui have repeating subsequences within the same pattern.