Creating a corpus of Jingju (Beijing Opera) music and possibilities for melodic analysis

Comunicació presentada a la 15th International Society for Music Information Retrieval Conference (ISMIR 2014), celebrada els dies 27 a 31 d'octubre de 2014 a Taipei, Taiwan.Jingju (Beijing opera) is a Chinese traditional performing art form in which theatrical and musical elements are in-timately combined. As an oral tradition, its musical di-mension is the result of the application of a series of pre-defined conventions and it offers unique concepts for mu-sicological research. Computational analyses of jingju music are still scarce, and only a few studies have dealt with it from an MIR perspective. In this paper we present the creation of a corpus of jingju music in the framework of the CompMusic project that is formed by audio, edito-rial metadata, lyrics and scores. We discuss the criteria followed for the acquisition of the data, describe the con-tent of the corpus, and evaluate its suitability for compu-tational and musicological research. We also identify several research problems that can take advantage of this corpus in the context of computational musicology, espe-cially for melodic analysis, and suggest approaches for future work.This research was funded by the European Research Council under the European Union’s Seventh Framework Program, as part of the CompMusic project (ERC grant agreement 267583)