The musical dimension of Chinese traditional theatre

An analysis from computer aided musicology

Companion page for Rafael Caro Repetto's PhD thesis

 

Download the thesis from https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.2030599

 

Contents

 

Music, and especially singing, is one of the most important dimensions of xiqu, Chinese traditional theatre. The melody of xiqu arias is arranged by actors and actresses according to an orally transmitted principle known as shengqiang. Deepening the state of the art understanding of shengqiang as source for melodic creation is the main motivation of this thesis. To this aim, I focus on one of the nowadays most acclaimed xiqu genres, jingju (also known as Peking or Beijing opera), and more specifically, on its two more representative shengqiang, namely xipi and erhuang. The goal of this thesis then is to characterise their melodic identity.

I propose a novel approach based on computer aided musicology. A corpus of machine readable music scores for 92 arias is created, covering 899 melodic lines. Grouped according to the four main elements of the jingju musical system, a comparative analysis is performed on 24 line categories in order to produce melodic schemata that represent each shengqiang’s melodic identity. To support and expand these results, a series of computational tools are developed to computationally extract statistical and quantitative information. The corpus, code, and generated data and figures are made openly available in this companion web page.

The produced melodic schemata are expected to contribute to future musicological and ethnomusicological research by offering a reference for these two shengqiang as sources for melodic creation in jingju. And as such, to contribute to the better understanding of jingju as a comprehensive art form for sinological studies.

 

Jingju Music Corpus

Jingju Audio Recordings Collection

The Jingju Audio Recordings Collection, described in Section 5.1 (152–160), is comprised of 91 commercial releases, covering 1687 recordings. Updated statistics of the collection and information about how to access it can be found in the following link:

 

Jingju Music Scores Collection

The Jingju Music Scores Collection, described in Section 5.2 (160–172), is comprised of 92 machine readable scores created from printed sources. Information about how to access the collection can be found in the following link.

 

Jingju Lyrics Collection

The Jingju Lyrics Collection, presented in Section 5.3 (173–174), contains aria lines scrapped from the 中国京剧戏考 Zhongguo Jingju Xikao website. It can be downloaded from the following link.

 

Jingju a Cappella Recordings Collection

The Jingju a Cappella Recordings Collection, presented in Section 5.4 (174–178), contains 226 original recordings. These include 45 recordings from the Singing Voice Audio Dataset, created at the Centre for Digital Music (Queen Mary, University of London) by Dawn A. A. Black, Ma Li, and Mi Tian. For referencing and license details of these recordings, please refer to the dataset's webpage (http://isophonics.net/SingingVoiceDataset). The remaining recordings are available under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 license. Currently, the collection is divided in two parts, that can be downloaded from the following links.

 

Code for computational analysis

For the automatic computation of statistical and quantitative information from the Jingju Music Scores Collection a script is written using the toolkit for computer aided musicology music21. This information is used in "Chapter 6  Relationship between linguistic tones and melody" (183–197) and "Chapter 7  Comparative analysis of jingju melodic lines" (199–254). The code can be downloaded from the following link.

 

Resulting plots and data

The plots and data resulting from the application of the previous code to the Jingju Music Scores Collection can be downloaded from the following link. These plots and data were used to support and expand the discussion of the melodic schemata obtained from the manual comparative analysis of the collection offered in the thesis's "Chapter 7  Comparative analysis of jingju melodic lines" (199–254). This content is also available in "Annex 2  Plots and data" (299–458).

 

Melodic schemata

The melodic schemata resulting from the comparative analysis can be downloaded from the following link. These schemata are presented and discussed in the thesis's "Chapter 7  Comparative analysis of jingju melodic lines" (199–254).

 

Thesis defense and award

The theis was defended on December 14, 2018 at 12:00 noon. The doctoral thesis board was formed by Dr. Jonathan Stock (University College Cork), president, Dr. Alicia Relinque Eleta (Universidad de Granada), secretary, and Dr. Agustín Martorell (Universitat Pompeu Fabra), member.

The thesis was awarded with Excellent Cum Laude.

 

Publications by the author

Related to the content of the thesis

  • Caro Repetto, Rafael, and Xavier Serra (2014) “Creating a Corpus of Jingju (Beijing Opera) Music and Possibilities for Melodic Analysis.” In Proceedings of the 15th International Society for Music Information Retrieval Conference (ISMIR 2014), Taipei, Taiwan, October 27–31, pp. 313–318. http://hdl.handle.net/10230/34999
  • Caro Repetto, Rafael, Rong Gong, Nadine Kroher, and Xavier Serra (2015) “Comparison of the Singing Style of Two Jingju Schools.” In Proceedings of the 16th International Society for Music Information Retrieval Conference (ISMIR 2015), Málaga, Spain, October 26–30, pp. 507–513. http://hdl.handle.net/10230/34975
  • Caro Repetto, Rafael, and Xavier Serra (2017) “A Collection of Music Scores for Corpus Based Jingju Singing Research.” In Proceedings of the 18th International Society for Music Information Retrieval Conference (ISMIR 2017), Suzhou, China, October 23–27, pp. 46–52. http://hdl.handle.net/10230/32603
  • Caro Repetto, Rafael, Shuo Zhang, and Xavier Serra (2017) “Quantitative analysis of the relationship between linguistic tones and melody in jingju using music scores.” In Proceedings of the 4th International Digital Libraries for Musicology workshop (DLfM 2017), Shanghai, China, October 28, pp. 41–44. http://hdl.handle.net/10230/32911
  • Dzhambazov, Georgi, Yile Yang, Rafael Caro Repetto, and Xavier Serra (2016) “Automatic alignment of long syllables in a cappella Beijing opera.” In Proceedings of the 6th International Workshop on Folk Music Analysis (FMA 2016), Dublin, Ireland, June 15–17, pp. 88–91. http://hdl.handle.net/10230/32889
  • Gong, Rong, Rafael Caro Repetto, and Xavier Serra (2017) “Creating an A Cappella Singing Audio Dataset for Automatic Jingju Singing Evaluation Research.” In Proceedings of the 4th International Digital Libraries for Musicology workshop (DLfM 2017), Shanghai, China, October 28, pp. 37–40. https://arxiv.org/abs/1708.03986
  • Srinivasamurthy, Ajay, Rafael Caro Repetto, Harshavardhan Sundar, and Xavier Serra (2014) “Transcription and Recognition of Syllable based Percussion Patterns: The Case of Beijing Opera.” In Proceedings of the 15th International Society for Music Information Retrieval Conference (ISMIR 2014), Taipei, Taiwan, October 27–31, pp. 431–436. http://hdl.handle.net/10230/25677
  • Zhang, Shuo, Rafael Caro Repetto, and Xavier Serra (2014) “Study of the Similarity between Linguistic Tones and Melodic Pitch Contours in Beijing Opera Singing.” In Proceedings of the 15th International Society for Music Information Retrieval Conference (ISMIR 2014), Taipei, Taiwan, October 27–31, pp. 343–348. http://hdl.handle.net/10230/35628
  • Zhang, Shuo, Rafael Caro Repetto, and Xavier Serra (2015) “Predicting Pairwise Pitch Contour Relations Based on Linguistic Tone Information in Beijing Opera Singing.” In Proceedings of the 16th International Society for Music Information Retrieval Conference (ISMIR 2015), Málaga, Spain, October 26–30, pp. 107–113. http://hdl.handle.net/10230/34996
  • Zhang, Shuo, Rafael Caro Repetto, and Xavier Serra (2017) “Understanding the Expressive Functions of Jingju Metrical Patterns through Lyrics Text Mining.” In Proceedings of the 18th International Society for Music Information Retrieval Conference (ISMIR 2017), Suzhou, China, October 23–27, pp. 397–403. http://hdl.handle.net/10230/32652

 

Not related to the content of the thesis

  • Itou, Katunobu, Rafael Caro Repetto, and Xavier Serra (2016) "Melody transcription framework using score information for Noh singing." In The Eighth International Conference on Creative Content Technologies (CONTENT 2016), Rome, Italy, March 20–24, pp. 36–41. http://hdl.handle.net/10230/33059
  • Caro Repetto, Rafael, Niccolò Pretto, Amin Chaachoo, Barış Bozkurt, and Xavier Serra (2018) “An open corpus for the computational research of Arab-Andalusian music.” In Proceedings of the 5th International Conference on Digital Libraries for Musicology workshop (DLfM 2018), Paris, France, September 28, pp. 78–86. http://hdl.handle.net/10230/35470
  • Pretto, Niccolò, Barış Bozkurt, Rafael Caro Repetto, and Xavier Serra (2018) "Nawba Recognition for Arab-Andalusian Music Using Templates From Music Scores." In Proceedings of the 15th Sound and Music Computing Conference (SMC18), Limassol, Cyprus, July 4–7, pp. 394–399. http://hdl.handle.net/10230/35463
caro2018theis-plotsAndData.zip
caro2018thesis-melodicSchemata.zip
20181214-CaroPhDDefense.pdf