Tunepal - Disseminating a Music Information Retrieval System to the Traditional Irish Music Community

In this paper we present two new query-by-playing (QBP) music information retrieval (MIR) systems aimed at musicians playing traditional Irish dance music. Firstly, a browser hosted system tunepal.org is presented. Secondly, we present Tunepal for iPhone/iPod touch devices a QBP system that can be used in situ in traditional music sessions. Both of these systems use a backend corpus of 13,290 tunes drawn from community sources and “standard” references. These systems have evolved from academic research to become popular tools used by musicians around the world. 16,064 queries have been logged since the systems were launched on 31 July, 2009 and 11 February, 2010 respectively to 18 May 2010. As we log data on every query made, including geocoding queries made on the iPhone, we propose that these tools may be used to follow trends in the playing of traditional music. We also present an analysis of the data we have collected on the usage of these systems.