Chew, E

the Fifth International Workshop on Folk Music Analysis

Tian, M

YANG, L

Queen Mary Research Online

Vibrato Characteristics and Frequency Histogram Envelopes in BeijingOpera SingingYANG, L; Tian, M; Chew, E; the Fifth International Workshop on Folk Music Analysis       For additional information about this publication click this link.http://qmro.qmul.ac.uk/xmlui/handle/123456789/16062   Information about this research object was correct at the time of download; we occasionallymake corrections to records, please therefore check the published record when citing. Formore information contact scholarlycommunications@qmul.ac.ukVIBRATO CHARACTERISTICS AND FREQUENCY HISTOGRAMENVELOPES IN BEIJING OPERA SINGINGLuwei Yang, Mi Tian and Elaine ChewCentre for Digital Music, Queen Mary University of London{l.yang, m.tian, elaine.chew}@qmul.ac.uk1. INTRODUCTIONBeijing opera, also known as Peking opera, is the predom-inant opera genre in China. The compound art form com-prises of singing, instrumental playing, and acting. Thereis now growing interest in the study of Beijing opera from acomputational perspective in recent years. Repetto & Serra(2014) created a dataset of sung Beijing opera melodiesfor computational analysis. Tian et al. (2014) investigatedonset detection for Beijing opera percussion instrumentsusing non-negative matrix factorization. Srinivasamurthyet al. (2014) utilized a Hidden Markov Model to transcribeand recognize percussion patterns. Sundberg et al. (2012)studied acoustically the singing for two Beijing opera roles,Laosheng and Dahualian, and found that the singing soundpressure level and pitch are higher than that of speech; fur-thermore, the vibrato rate was reported to be around 3.5Hz,which is lower than that generally found in Western clas-sical singing. However, research into the expressivity ofthe featured singing and instrumentation in Beijing operais still lacking in the literature.Oriental opera singing possesses characteristics distinctfrom Western opera. This study aims to investigate theexpressive characteristics of Beijing opera singing focus-ing on pitch and vibrato. Like the Sundberg et al. study,we will also focus on two major Beijing opera roles, thoseof Laosheng and Zhengdan. Our study involves a largerdataset, 16 performances instead of 7. While Sundberg etal.’s study focused on sound pressure level, pitch, and long-term average spectra, with vibrato being a side discussion,we will consider frequency distributions and details of vi-brato parameters such as rate, extent, and sinusoid similar-ity.We choose to focus on pitch because it is one of themost important features in computational music analysis;this is also true for analysis of world music. For example,Koduri et al. (2012) examined pitch histograms in IndianCarnatic music. Similar research is lacking for Beijingopera singing. Moreover, Chinese traditional music relieson a system with unique characteristics different from thatof other music cultures (Tian et al., 2013).Vibrato is one of the most important ornamental per-forming techniques in Beijing opera (Wichmann, 1989).Investigation into the nature of vibrato use in Beijing operasinging will thus assist in the understanding of the overallplots and the motifs of the story and the roles. We are alsointerested in investigating the relationship between vibratouse in singing vs. in the main instrument, i.e. jinghu, inBeijing opera. Jinghu is the predominant instrument andfrequently doubles the singing voice in Beijing opera, butwe lack vibrato statistics for the instrument. The jinghuand erhu belong to the same two-stringed instrument fam-ily, and possess similar form and, we anticipate, vibratocharacteristics. In order to compare Beijing opera singingand jinghu vibrato characteristics, we use data previouslyestablished for the erhu (Yang et al., 2013).2. DATASETWe used the singing voice dataset 1 described in (Blacket al., 2014). This study is focused on two Beijing operaroles: Laosheng (老生) and Zhengdan (正旦) (also knownas Qingyi (青衣)).The dataset consisted of a total of 16 monophonic per-formances of well-known phrases in the opera sung by6 different Chinese opera singers. All vibratos in eachperformance were labelled by the first two authors usingTony 2 . We found a total of 344 vibratos from the Laoshengrole, and 273 vibratos from the Zhengdan role.3. RESULTSFigure 1 shows the smoothed frequency histogram envelopesfor the Laosheng and Zhengdan data, respectively. Thesung frequencies were extracted using the Tony software.The extracted frequencies were summed into one-cent bins,and the results were smoothed to obtain the histogram en-velope.Because Zhengdan is a female role, we expect the part’spitches to be higher than those of the Laosheng role. Theresults show that this is indeed the case; however,Laosheng’s phrases utilize a wider pitch range than that ofZhengdan, and the highest pitches are in fact higher thanmost of Zhengdan’s pitches. This maybe helpful in roletype classification. It is interesting to note that the peaks inthe frequency plot show that the Chinese opera melodiesalso use a semitone scale like that in Western music, al-though the most prevalent pitches use the traditional Chi-nese pentatonic scale.Figure 2 compares the distributions of the vibrato rates,extents, and sinusoid similarity measures for the recorded1 http://www.isophonics.net/SingingVoiceDataset2 https://code.soundsoftware.ac.uk/projects/tony/files40 45 50 55 60 65 70 75 80 8500.51x 10−3 Smoothed frequency histogram envelopes for Laosheng’s partMIDI ScaleNormalized Frequency40 45 50 55 60 65 70 75 80 85012x 10−3 Smoothed frequency histogram envelopes for Zhengdan’s partMIDI ScaleNormalized FrequencyFigure 1: Smoothed frequency histogram envelopes forLaosheng’s and Zhengdan’s parts.024681012Laosheng ZhengdanRate(Hz)00.511.52Laosheng ZhengdanExtent(Semiton)0.10.20.30.40.50.60.70.80.91Laosheng ZhengdanSinusoid SimilarityFigure 2: Box plots of vibrato statistics (rate, extent, sinu-soid similarity) for Laosheng and Zhengdan.singing for the Laosheng and Zhengdan roles. The vi-brato parameters were obtained using methods describedin (Yang et al., 2013). The plots show that the Laoshengand Zhengdan roles are sung with similar vibrato rates ranges,similar to vibrato employed in Western opera singing. Thisobservation contradicts the findings of (Sundberg et al.,2012), in which the vibrato rate was shown to be about3.5Hz. The singing vibrato rate range is also similar tothat of erhu described in (Yang et al., 2013)The Laosheng role was sung with vibrato having an av-erage extent of almost one semitone, while Zhengdan’srole is sung with mean vibrato extent approximately halfa semitone wide. These extent values are consistent withthose in Western opera singing, which ranges from 0.34 to1.23 semitones (Prame, 1997). The vibrato extent range issimilar to that found for the erhu in (Yang et al., 2013).The vibrato sinusoid similarity for both roles have a me-dian of 0.71, which is lower than the 0.85 found in erhuplaying (Yang et al., 2013). This indicates that singers mayhave more expressive freedom than erhu players, leading tomore non-sinusoid shaped vibratos. Also, it may be moredifficult for a singer to control the voice in a perfectly pe-riodic manner.4. CONCLUSIONIn this study, we examined the pitch histograms and vibratostatistics of singing of two Beijing opera roles, Laoshengand Zhengdan. Laosheng (a male role) employs lowerpitches, but a much larger pitch range, than Zhengdan (afemale role). The singing employed all twelve pitches inthe Western scale, and the vibrato rates and extents are sim-ilar to those in Western opera singing. Laosheng’s role issung with significantly larger vibrato extents than that ofZhengdan.Some interesting phenomena have been noticed. Vi-bratos in Beijing opera singing have rates and extents simi-lar to that of erhu performance, which we use as a proxy forcharacteristics of jinghu vibratos. This is a demonstration,to some degree, of the hypothesis that string instrumentsare designed to mimic the human voice. The similaritybetween jinghu and erhu vibratos should be confirmed infuture work.Finally, portamenti also form an important characteris-tic of Beijing opera singing. Future work will include sta-tistical analysis of portamenti properties in Beijing operaperformance.5. REFERENCESBlack, D. A. A., Ma, L., & Tian, M. (2014). Automatic iden-tification of emotional cues in Chinese opera singing. InProc. of 13th Int. Conf. on Music Perception and Cogni-tion and the 5th Conference for the Asian-Pacific Societyfor Cognitive Sciences of Music (ICMPC 13-APSC0M 5).Koduri, G. K., Serra`, J., & Serra, X. (2012). Characterizationof intonation in carnatic music by parametrizing pitch his-tograms. In Proc. of the International Society for MusicInformation Retrieval Conference (ISMIR).Prame, E. (1997). Vibrato extent and intonation in professionalwestern lyric singing. J. Acoust. Soc. Am., 102, 616–621.Repetto, R. C. & Serra, X. (2014). Creating a corpus of jingju(Beijing opera) music and possibilities for melodic analy-sis. In Proc. of the International Society for Music Infor-mation Retrieval Conference (ISMIR).Srinivasamurthy, A., Repetto, R. C., Sundar, H., & Serra, X.(2014). Transcription and recognition of syllable basedpercussion patterns: The case of Beijing opera. In Proc. ofthe International Society for Music Information RetrievalConference (ISMIR).Sundberg, J., Gu, L., Huang, Q., & Huang, P. (2012). Acous-tical study of classical Peking opera singing. Journal ofVoice, 26(2), 137–143.Tian, M., Fazekas, G., Black, D., & Sandler, M. (2013). To-wards the representation of Chinese traditional music: Astate of the art review of music metadata standards. InProc. of the International Conference on Dublin Core andMetadata Applications.Tian, M., Srinivasamurthy, A., Sandler, M., & Serra, X. (2014).A study of instrument-wise onset detection in Beijing operapercussion ensembles. In Proc. IEEE Int. Conf. Acous-tics, Speech, and Signal Processing.Wichmann, E. (1989). Listening to theatre: the aural dimensionof Beijing opera. University of Hawaii Press.Yang, L., Chew, E., & Rajab, K. Z. (2013). Vibrato performancestyle: A case study comparing erhu and violin. In Proc.of the 10th International Conference on Computer MusicMultidisciplinary Research (CMMR).

Vibrato Characteristics and Frequency Histogram Envelopes in Beijing Opera Singing

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Vibrato Characteristics and Frequency Histogram Envelopes in Beijing Opera Singing

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