CCOM-HuQin: An Annotated Multimodal Chinese Fiddle Performance Dataset

HuQin (胡琴) is a family of traditional Chinese bowed string instruments. Playing techniques (PTs) embodied in various playing styles add abundant emotional coloring and aesthetic feelings to HuQin performance. The complex applied techniques make HuQin music a challenging source for fundamental MIR tasks such as pitch analysis, transcription and score-audio alignment. In this paper, we present a multimodal performance dataset of HuQin music that contains audio-visual recordings of 11,992 single PT clips and 57 annotated musical excerpts of classical pieces. We systematically describe the HuQin PT taxonomy based on musicological theory and practical use cases. Then we introduce the dataset creation methodology and highlight the annotation principles featuring PTs. We analyze the statistics in different aspects to demonstrate the variety of PTs played in HuQin subcategories and perform preliminary experiments to show the potential applications of the dataset in various MIR tasks and cross-cultural music studies. Finally, we propose future work to extend the dataset. Keywords: Chinese bowed string instruments, Chinese fiddle, Performance dataset, Playing technique, Music transcription, Annotation