Constructing a Multimedia Chinese Musical Instrument Database

Throughout history, more than 2000 Chinese musical instruments have existed or been historically recorded, they are of non-negligible importance in Chinese musicology. However, the public knows little about them. In this work, we present a multimedia database of Chinese musical instruments. This database includes, for each instrument, text descriptions, images, audio clips of playing techniques, music clips, videos of the craft process and recording process, and acoustic analysis materials. Motivation and selecting criteria of the database are introduced in detail. Potential applications based on this database are discussed, and we take the research on subjective auditory attributes of Chinese musical instruments as an example.