Comparision of the singing style of two jingju schools

Comunicació presentada a la 16th International Society for Music Information Retrieval Conference (ISMIR 2015), celebrada els dies 26 a 30 d'octubre de 2015 a Màlaga, Espanya.Performing schools (liupai) in jingju (also known as Peking or Beijing opera) are one of the most important elements for the appreciation of this genre among connoisseurs. In the current paper, we study the potential of MIR techniques for supporting and enhancing musicological descriptions of the singing style of two of the most renowned jingju schools for the dan role-type, namely Mei and Cheng schools. To this aim, from the characteristics commonly used for describing singing style in musicological literature, we have selected those that can be studied using standard audio features. We have selected eight recordings from our jingju music research corpus and have applied current algorithms for the measurement of the selected features. Obtained results support the descriptions from musicological sources in all cases but one, and also add precision to them by providing specific measurements. Besides, our methodology suggests some characteristics not accounted for in our musicological sources. Finally, we discuss the need for engaging jingju experts in our future research and applying this approach for musicological and educational purposes as a way of better validating our methodology.This research is funded by the European Research Council under the European Union’s Seventh Framework Program, as part of the CompMusic project (ERC grant agreement 267583)