Enabling access to Irish traditional music on a PDA

This paper describes TunePal, a tool which facilitates convenient audio access to archive transcriptions of traditional tunes on a PDA. The main feature of TunePal is its ability to locate a tune by name or musical phrase from thousands stored on a PDA. TunePal enhances not only the recall of a musician using TunePal in a traditional music session, but also the acquisition of new repertoire. In this paper we briefly describe the sources of music that TunePal works on, present its main features, give a technical description and present efforts at disseminating TunePal to the wider traditional music community.