, 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 drums, 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 ...

and the tsuzumi. ''Kuchi shōga'' phoneticizes (that is, phonetically articulates) drum strokes using Japanese sound symbolism. Each syllable conveys information about how the

drummer A drummer is a percussionist who creates music using drums. Most contemporary western bands that play rock, pop, jazz, or R&B music include a drummer for purposes including timekeeping and embellishing the musical timbre. The drummer' ...

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), ''Notes'' (album), a 1987 album by Paul Bley and Paul Motian * ''Notes'', a common (yet unofficial) sho ...

. 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 f ...

, a syllabary 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 ...

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 ...

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 (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 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 percu ...

Rests

Rests are variously indicated with

fricative A fricative is a consonant manner of articulation, produced by forcing air through a narrow channel made by placing two Place of articulation, articulators close together. These may be the lower lip against the upper teeth, in the case of ; the ba ...

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." 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, whic ...

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: 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