On the basis of "common folk songs", Song Xianghe inherited the traditional artistic forms of Qin, Zhao, Chorus, Chu and so on in the pre-Qin period, which were found in entertainment places, banquets, folk activities and so on.

Song Xianghe mainly comes from folk street songs, similar to the present oratorio. It is a very old performance without musical instrument accompaniment. In the subsequent development, it was gradually combined with dance, and then the style of instrumental music and song and dance appeared.

Later, Song Xianghe broke away from dancing and became a pure ensemble of musical instruments and songs, also known as Daqu. It is a more advanced form of performance in Song Xianghe, with a complicated structure, and usually consists of three parts: colorful songs and disorderly songs.

Han dynasty rhythm

The "five tones" in the ancient melody refers to the five basic tones of Gong, Shang, Jiao, Zheng and Yu, which, together with Gong and Zheng, constitute the "seven tones", corresponding to today's 1(do), 2(re), 3(mi), 4(fa) and 5(sol.

Its corresponding order is palace (1), quotient (2), angle (3), variation sign (4), sign (5), feather (6) and variation palace (7). These seven tones are relative pitches, not absolute pitches, but the distance between two adjacent tones is fixed.

It is difficult to understand the tonal characteristics of Xianghe songs in Han Dynasty. Judging from the remains of the Han and Wei Dynasties in the existing Qin music and related records, its scale form belongs to a new scale, but the transformation of clearing the angle and changing the feather into the palace in music is more prominent, and the so-called "clearing the border" (Tang and Zhao Wei are the words) is one of its main characteristics.