Tunepal: searching a digital library of traditional music scores

This paper aims to describe the Tunepal project as an example of a music information retrieval (MIR) system that is having an impact on how musicians access, learn and play traditional Irish music around the world.

This paper describes the functionality of the Tunepal system: consisting of the tune corpus, the web site tunepal.org and mobile apps supporting iOS and Android OS. Tunepal facilitates query‐by‐title and query‐by‐playing music (QBP) searches and allows a musician to retrieve and playback scores amongst other supported functions.

Tunepal has been favorably received and musicians report that the system is being used in a variety of scenarios including archiving and the preparation of sleeve notes for commercial recordings. Tunepal has a growing user base in 25 countries.

The comprehensive tune corpus (over 16,000 compositions), the query‐by‐playing technology and the fact that the mobile apps provide access to the corpus in situ in traditional music sessions and classes make this project uniquely useful.