, also known as kuchi showa or kuchi shoka, is an educational

musical notation Music notation or musical notation is any system used to visually represent aurally perceived music played with instruments or sung by the human voice through the use of written, printed, or otherwise-produced symbols, including notation fo ...

for traditional Japanese

drum The drum is a member of the percussion group of musical instruments. In the Hornbostel-Sachs classification system, it is a membranophone. Drums consist of at least one membrane, called a drumhead or drum skin, that is stretched over a she ...

s, particularly the

taiko are a broad range of Japanese percussion instruments. In Japanese, the term refers to any kind of drum, but outside Japan, it is used specifically to refer to any of the various Japanese drums called and to the form of ensemble drumming m ...

and the

tsuzumi The or ''tsuzumi'' is a hand drum of Japanese origin. It consists of a wooden body shaped like an hourglass, and it is taut, with two drum heads with cords that can be squeezed or released to increase or decrease the tension of the heads resp ...

. ''Kuchi shōga'' phoneticizes (that is,

phonetically Phonetics is a branch of linguistics that studies how humans produce and perceive sounds, or in the case of sign languages, the equivalent aspects of sign. Linguists who specialize in studying the physical properties of speech are phoneticians. ...

articulates) drum strokes using

Japanese sound symbolism The Japanese language has a large inventory of sound symbolic or mimetic words, known in linguistics as ideophones. Such words are found in written as well as spoken Japanese. Known popularly as ''onomatopoeia'', these words are not just imitat ...

. Each

syllable A syllable is a unit of organization for a sequence of speech sounds typically made up of a syllable nucleus (most often a vowel) with optional initial and final margins (typically, consonants). Syllables are often considered the phonological "bu ...

conveys information about how the

drummer A drummer is a percussionist who creates music using drum The drum is a member of the percussion group of musical instruments. In the Hornbostel-Sachs classification system, it is a membranophone. Drums consist of at least one mem ...

is to play a particular

note Note, notes, or NOTE may refer to: Music and entertainment * Musical note, a pitched sound (or a symbol for a sound) in music * ''Notes'' (album), a 1987 album by Paul Bley and Paul Motian * ''Notes'', a common (yet unofficial) shortened version ...

. Kuchi shōga notation is written in

katakana is a Japanese syllabary, one component of the Japanese writing system along with hiragana, kanji and in some cases the Latin script (known as rōmaji). The word ''katakana'' means "fragmentary kana", as the katakana characters are derived fr ...

, a

syllabary In the linguistic study of written languages, a syllabary is a set of written symbols that represent the syllables or (more frequently) moras which make up words. A symbol in a syllabary, called a syllabogram, typically represents an (optiona ...

familiar to all literate

Japanese language is spoken natively by about 128 million people, primarily by Japanese people and primarily in Japan, the only country where it is the national language. Japanese belongs to the Japonic or Japanese- Ryukyuan language family. There have been ma ...

speakers. Kuchi shōga can be

transliterated Transliteration is a type of conversion of a text from one script to another that involves swapping letters (thus '' trans-'' + '' liter-'') in predictable ways, such as Greek → , Cyrillic → , Greek → the digraph , Armenian → or ...

from katakana to a

Latin alphabet The Latin alphabet or Roman alphabet is the collection of letters originally used by the ancient Romans to write the Latin language. Largely unaltered with the exception of extensions (such as diacritics), it used to write English and the o ...

using one of the various systems of ''

rōmaji The romanization of Japanese is the use of Latin script to write the Japanese language. This method of writing is sometimes referred to in Japanese as . Japanese is normally written in a combination of logographic characters borrowed from Ch ...

''.

Common phoneticizations

Although kuchi shōga does not have a fixed vocabulary, some phoneticizations are ubiquitous. ''Don'' typically means a deep, sustained sound from the center of the taiko. ''Do'' sometimes represents a short beat that is not allowed to

resonate Resonance describes the phenomenon of increased amplitude that occurs when the frequency of an applied Periodic function, periodic force (or a Fourier analysis, Fourier component of it) is equal or close to a natural frequency of the system ...

(i.e., one with a short decay). ''Doko'', ''dogo'', or ''doro'' means two drum-beats played in rapid succession. ''Tsu'' represents a lightly struck note; ''tsuku'' implies two soft ''tsu'' beats in rapid succession—one on the right side of the drum, the other on the left. ''Ka'' means a sharp tap on the rim of the taiko, and ''kara'' describes alternate right and left taps. Taiko players commonly phoneticize a right-handed

bachi ''Bachi'' (, ; also ''batchi'') are straight, wooden sticks used on Japanese taiko drums, and also the plectrum (written ) for stringed instruments of Japanese origin such as the shamisen and '' biwa''. For percussion Drum bachi (, ) are ...

stroke with ''don'', ''do'', ''tsu'', or ''ka'', respectively; and a reserve ''kon'', ''ko'', ''ku'', and ''ra'' for left-handed strokes. Two syllables are reserved for strokes on the tsuzumi, a drum that is much smaller than the taiko: ''Ta'' describes a tap on the side of the drum; ''pon'' refers to a stroke on the center of the

drumhead A drumhead or drum skin is a membrane stretched over one or both of the open ends of a drum. The drumhead is struck with sticks, mallets, or hands, so that it vibrates and the sound resonates through the drum. Additionally outside of percus ...

Rests

Rests are variously indicated with

fricative A fricative is a consonant produced by forcing air through a narrow channel made by placing two articulators close together. These may be the lower lip against the upper teeth, in the case of ; the back of the tongue against the soft palate in t ...

syllables, such as ''sa'' and ''ho''; or with

semivowel In phonetics and phonology, a semivowel, glide or semiconsonant is a sound that is phonetically similar to a vowel sound but functions as the syllable boundary, rather than as the nucleus of a syllable. Examples of semivowels in English are the ...

s, such as ''iya''. A polysyllable, such as ''sore'' and ''dokkoi'', indicates a two-beat rest. This is called "

kakegoe ''Kakegoe'' () usually refers to shouts and calls used in performances of traditional Japanese music, Kabuki theatre, and in martial arts such as kendo. Kabuki In the kabuki theatre, the term is used to refer to melodramatic calls from an audien ...

." If the rest is not sung, the space is often filled with unscripted sounds called

kiai KIAI (93.9 FM) is a commercial radio station that serves the areas of Mason City, Iowa and Austin–Albert Lea, Minnesota. The station broadcasts a Country format. KIAI is owned by Alpha Media, through licensee Digity 3E License, LLC, which ...

s. Explicitly assigning words to represent the periods of silence in a song is likely linked to the Japanese concept of '' ma'', where the space between notes is as important as the notes themselves in a performance.

Sample notation

The following is an example of kuchi shōga

notation In linguistics and semiotics, a notation is a system of graphics or symbols, characters and abbreviated expressions, used (for example) in artistic and scientific disciplines to represent technical facts and quantities by convention. Therefore, ...

transliterated in ''rōmaji'': Don (tsu) doko don, don (tsu) don kon, doko don (tsu) don When played in

common time The time signature (also known as meter signature, metre signature, or measure signature) is a notational convention used in Western musical notation to specify how many beats (pulses) are contained in each measure (bar), and which note value ...

, this sequence constitutes three

measures Measure may refer to: * Measurement, the assignment of a number to a characteristic of an object or event Law * Ballot measure, proposed legislation in the United States * Church of England Measure, legislation of the Church of England * Measu ...

: 1 . 3&4, 1 . 3 4, 1&2 . 4. The sticking, describing which hand the note is played with (R= Right, L=Left), is: R . RLR, R . R L, RLR . R

Common phoneticizations

Rests

Sample notation

See also