Xi'an Drum Music is a representative project of Human Oral and Intangible Cultural Heritage in China, with a history of over a thousand years. The percussion score used in it is called Gu Zhazi.

Gu Zhazi（鼓札子）, also known as Drum spectrum, is a rhythmic music score written in the form of percussion instruments such as drums, gongs, and bangs, with sound characters and performance techniques. Before the 1950s, the transmission of it mainly relied on "oral". After the 1950s, scholars began to collect and organize its materials, learn from folk musicians, and record the musical scores. Currently, there are a total of 282 sets of music pieces containing Gu Zhazi recorded in books, which encompass almost all the Gu zhazi that can be played by current folk musicians, as well as music pieces that has been recorded but has already lost. 

As China has not yet explored effective analysis methods for Gu Zhazi. Therefore, relevant research result is rare. This article combines the author's five-month experience in learning percussion music under the guidance of national-level intangible cultural heritage inheritors such as Mr. Gu Jingzhao, and all the audio-visual materials collected, to analyze the Gu zhazi used in conjunction with the melody. After a series of analyses, this article found that it mainly includes seven types of rhythmic structures: fixed, combination of fixed and improvisation, linking, variation, strong tone overlap, consistent melody and drum, and a fixed rhythm throughout. This discovery will provide an opportunity for a deeper understanding of the rhythmic structure of Gu Zhazi, and have enlightening significance for analyzing similar percussion scores. In addition, it may also provide reference for the protection, inheritance, and innovation of Chinese traditional music, and thus contribute to the construction of the theoretical system of traditional music rhythmology.