DOI: 10.5281/zenodo.1475846
title: Jingju Audio Recordings Collection

description: The <strong>Jingju Audio Recordings Collection</strong> (<strong>JARC</strong>) is part of the <strong>Jingju Music Corpus</strong> created in the <strong>CompMusic</strong> project. It is formed by 91 commercial CDs. The purpose of the <strong>JARC</strong> is the computational research of singing melody in jingju arias from the traditional repertoire (传统戏). Therefore, the <strong>JARC</strong> is comprised of CDs consisting of aria compilations (excluding recordings of full plays or of arias from modern plays (现代戏). In order to apply computational techniques, the CDs were selected with the required recording quality. Therefore, the <strong>JARC</strong> contains releases from the 1980s onwards.

<strong>Content of the JARC</strong>

The <strong>JARC</strong> is comprised by the ripped tracks of the 91 realeases in FLAC format. Each release is accompanied by a <code>Cover Art</code> folder including scanned copies of its cover art. All the corresponding editorial metadata are available in the MusicBrainz collection <strong>Dunya Jingju</strong> in its original Chinese script. In order to ease non Chinese speakers browsing the collection, all releases have a pseudo-release including the romanized version of the release's and each recording's titles using the Hanyu Pinyin system. The romanized version of the artist's name can be obtained from the MusicBrainz field 'sort name.' Romanizations of the related works are available as aliases. Consequently releases, recordings, artists and works can be searched both in Chinese and Latin scripts. The editorial metadata stored in MusicBrainz, including the front image from the cover art, are used to tag the FLAC files using MusicBrainz Picard.

Since the purpose of the <strong>JARC</strong> is the research of jingju singing melody, all recordings are tagged with their corresponding <em>shengqiang</em> and <em>banshi</em>, and all artists are tagged with their corresponding role type. When the release makes it clearly explicit, artists are also tagged with their corresponding school (流派).

In order to give an overview of the <strong>JARC</strong>'s coverage, the following numbers summarize some of its content:


	It comprises <strong>91 releases</strong>, covering <strong>1687 recordings</strong>, which account for more than <strong>154 hours</strong> of music.
	It contains <strong>95 performers</strong> (considering only actors and actresses, not instrumentalists), covering the most representative role types in terms of singing:
	
		<strong><em>dan</em></strong>: 34 artists, 634 recordings
		<strong><em>laosheng</em></strong>: 25 artists, 562 recordings
		<strong><em>laodan</em></strong>: 11 artists, 262 recordings
		<strong><em>xiaosheng</em></strong>: 10 artists, 71 recordings
		<strong><em>jing</em></strong>: 8 artists, 138 recordings
	
	
	It presents a wide coverage of the two more representative <em>shengqiang</em> in jingju, namely <em>erhuang</em> (612 recordings) and <em>xipi</em> (811 recordings), and it also covers others such as <em>fan'erhuang</em> (123 recordings), <em>fanxipi</em> (29 recordings), <em>sipingdiao</em> (64 recordings), <em>nanbangzi</em> (60 recordings), <em>gaobozi</em> (9 recordings) and others.
	It comprises the recording of 792 jingju arias from 299 different plays.


<strong>Using the JARC</strong>

Since the <strong>JARC</strong> is sourced from copyrighted releases, it can only be shared for non commercial research purposes (see the form below).

For referencing the <strong>JARC</strong>, and obtaining a more detailed description of it, please refer to


Caro Repetto, Rafael (2018) <em>The musical dimension of Chinese traditional theatre: An analysis from computer aided musicology</em>. PhD thesis, Universitat Pompeu Fabra, Barcelona, Spain.


<strong>Acknowledgements</strong>

The creation of the <strong>JARC</strong> is funded by the European Research Council under the European Union’s Seventh Framework Program (FP7/2007-2013), as part of the CompMusic project (ERC grant agreement 267583).