When “Everything” is Information: Irish Traditional Music and Information Retrieval

As a global phenomenon, Irish traditional music has a tremendous following, while practitioners of Irish traditional music often disagree on shared aspects of their music culture. This provides numerous challenges when organizing traditional Irish traditional music for retrieval purposes. This paper describes the music information seeking and retrieval (MIR) challenges of Irish traditional music in terms of the physical paradigm and user-centered relevance, using TheSession.org as an example. Limitations of the physical paradigm are addressed, both related to the traditional music subject matter, and how current MIR systems fall short in their attempts to manage Irish traditional music. Additional discussions of user-centered relevance contextualize the problems related to music information seeking and retrieval with traditional musics. In the future, representations of music objects connected as linked open data, combined with multiple query capabilities, may provide a robust and flexible structure for traditional music information seeking and retrieval.