A Collection of Music Scores for Corpus Based Jingju Singing Research

The MIR research on jingju (also known as Beijing or Peking opera) music has taken audio as the main source of information. Music scores are an important resource for the musicological research of this tradition, but no machine readable ones have been available for computational analysis. In order to explore the potential of symbolic score data for jingju music research, we have expanded the CompMusic Jingju Music Corpus, which contains mostly audio, with a collection of 92 machine readable scores, for a total of 897 melodic lines. Since our purpose is the study of jingju singing in terms of its musical system elements, we have selected the arias used as examples in reference jingju music textbooks. The collection is accompanied by scores metadata, curated annotations per score and melodic line, and a set of software tools for extracting statistical information from it. All the gathered data and developed software are available for research purposes. In this paper we first discuss the culture specific concepts that are needed for understanding the contents of the collection, followed by a detailed description of it. We then present a series of computational analyses performed on the scores and discuss some musicological findings.