Learning traditional Irish music using a PDA

A common problem experienced by musicians in traditional music sessions is that of recalling tunes on demand from a large repertoire. Traditional music is largely an oral medium and musicians may recall a name or player of a tune or set, but require hearing the first few notes to start the tune. In this paper, we present our work developing TunePal, a tool that can be used by musicians for the storage and retrieval of traditional music melodies for learning purposes. TunePal is specifically desiged to be used by musicians playing Irish traditional music in sessions as it supports the ABC format for musical notiaon, and was tested on a a collection of over two thousand tunes common in traditional music sessions. Traditional music sessions often take place in pubs, where access to a PC is not practical. We have therefore developed TunePal to run on the pocket PC platform.