Jingju Audio Recordings Collection

The Jingju Audio Recordings Collection (JARC) is part of the Jingju Music Corpus created in the CompMusic project. It is formed by 91 commercial CDs. The purpose of the JARC is the computational research of singing melody in jingju arias from the traditional repertoire (传统戏). Therefore, the JARC 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 JARC contains releases from the 1980s onwards. Content of the JARC The JARC is comprised by the ripped tracks of the 91 realeases in FLAC format. Each release is accompanied by a Cover Art folder including scanned copies of its cover art. All the corresponding editorial metadata are available in the MusicBrainz collection Dunya Jingju 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 JARC is the research of jingju singing melody, all recordings are tagged with their corresponding shengqiang and banshi, 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 JARC's coverage, the following numbers summarize some of its content: It comprises 91 releases, covering 1687 recordings, which account for more than 154 hours of music. It contains 95 performers (considering only actors and actresses, not instrumentalists), covering the most representative role types in terms of singing: dan: 34 artists, 634 recordings laosheng: 25 artists, 562 recordings laodan: 11 artists, 262 recordings xiaosheng: 10 artists, 71 recordings jing: 8 artists, 138 recordings It presents a wide coverage of the two more representative shengqiang in jingju, namely erhuang (612 recordings) and xipi (811 recordings), and it also covers others such as fan'erhuang (123 recordings), fanxipi (29 recordings), sipingdiao (64 recordings), nanbangzi (60 recordings), gaobozi (9 recordings) and others. It comprises the recording of 792 jingju arias from 299 different plays. Using the JARC Since the JARC is sourced from copyrighted releases, it can only be shared for non commercial research purposes (see the form below). For referencing the JARC, and obtaining a more detailed description of it, please refer to Caro Repetto, Rafael (2018) The musical dimension of Chinese traditional theatre: An analysis from computer aided musicology. PhD thesis, Universitat Pompeu Fabra, Barcelona, Spain. Acknowledgements The creation of the JARC 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).