Tunepal: the Traditional Musician\u27s Toolbox

In this paper we present Tunepal, a search engine and music retrieval tool for traditional musicians that runs on an iPhone/iPod Touch (2nd generation)/iPad. Tunepal connects musicians the scores and metadata of 13,290 traditional Irish, Welsh, Scottish and Breton dance tunes. These tunes are drawn from community sources, such as the website thesession.org and “standard” references including O’Neills Dance Music of Ireland and Brendan Breathneach’s Ceol Rince Na hÉireann series. Tunes can be retrieved by typing in a title or by playing a twelve second extract from the tune on a traditional instrument. Tunepal can be used in sitiu in traditional music sessions, classes and concerts. This paper presents background information on the sources of music contained in the Tunepal corpus and describes the functionality, operation, development and usage of the app