"Yuefu" began to appear in the Qin and Han Dynasties. It inherited the style collection system of the Zhou Dynasty, collecting, organizing and changing folk music, and also gathered a large number of musicians to perform on banquets, suburban sacrifices, court greetings and other occasions. These lyrics for singing are called Yuefu poems. Yuefu was later extended to refer to various lyrics that are suitable for music or not. Even some operas and instrumental music are also called Yuefu. The main song form in the Han Dynasty was Xianghe song. It evolved from the original acapella singing of "one person singing and three people harmonizing" to the "Xianghe Daqu" with silk and bamboo musical instruments accompaniment, and has a "colorful - tending - chaotic" music structure, which was very important to the Sui and Tang Dynasties. The songs and dances of the time had an important influence. During the Han Dynasty, drumming music emerged in the northwest frontier. It uses different arrangements of wind instruments and percussion instruments to form a variety of blowing forms, such as horizontal blowing, riding blowing, Huangmen blowing and so on. They were played on horseback or on the march, and were used in military ceremonies, court banquets, and folk entertainment. The folk wind and percussion music that still exists today must have traces of the advocacy of the Han Dynasty. In the Han Dynasty, "Baixi" appeared, which was a program that combined singing, dancing, acrobatics, and sumo wrestling. The achievement of temperament in the Han Dynasty was that Jingfang divided the octave into sixty temperaments using the three-point gain and loss method. Although this theory is meaningless in musical practice, it reflects the subtlety of temperament thinking. Theoretically, the effect of the fifty-three equal law is achieved. Characteristics of music development in the Song and Yuan Dynasties: Not only did the previously dominant song and dance music continue to develop, but many new music varieties were produced, which enabled the comprehensive development of vocal and instrumental music and became the foundation of modern Chinese music. Since the Han and Wei dynasties, with the introduction of Buddhism, Buddhist music has also become very popular. Most of the original Buddhist music "Dharma music" came from countries such as Qiuci or Tianzhu in the Western Regions. In the Qi and Liang dynasties of the Southern Dynasties, "Qing Shang Yue" began to be used to serve Buddhism. Its further development was the "Faqu" of the Tang Dynasty.
With the introduction of music from various ethnic minorities and foreign music, musical instruments such as Quxiang pipa, 筚篥 (bìlì sound Bi Li), and Jie (jié syllable) drums have been widely used. In the theory of musical temperament, Qin uses pure temperament. Xunxu of Jin Dynasty (xù pronunciation) used the "Guankou Correction" method. He Chengtian of the Song Dynasty invented a "new law" close to the twelve equal temperaments. As a denial of Confucian orthodoxy, there emerged an outstanding treatise on music aesthetics - "Soundless Music Theory" written by Ji Kang in the late Wei Dynasty, and a famous general history of music - "Book of Song·Yue Zhi" written by Shen Yue during Qi and Liang Dynasties.