Tunepal is a popular search engine and music retrieval tool for musicians playing traditional Irish dance music. Tunepal is accessible through the website tunepal.org and through mobile apps available on iOS and Android OS. Tunepal connects musicians to the scores and metadata of 23,000 traditional Irish, Welsh, Scottish, Breton, American marching band and Canadian dance tunes drawn from community sources, such as the website thesession.org and “standard” references including Aird’s Airs, O’Neills Dance Music of Ireland and Breandán Breathnach’s Ceol Rince Na hÉireann series. Tunes can be retrieved by typing in a title or through a unique query-by-playing interface that allows users to find tunes by playing a twelve second extract from the tune on a traditional instrument. Tunepal on mobile devices can be used in sitiu in traditional music sessions, classes and concerts. Tunepal has proven very popular both in Ireland and internationally, with users in 29 countries.

Awards for Tunepal:

• Listed in the top 500 apps of all time by the Sunday Times (Feb 2012)
• Top twenty cultural apps for by the Sunday Times (28 March 2010).
• Best overall invention 2010 in the Dublin Institute of Technology

Screenshots of the Android version of Tunepal:

         

A YouTube video of the iPhone version:

Tunepal has been featured on RTE, the Irish Times, the Irish Daily Mail, Fointe, the Irish News, the Companion to Traditional Irish Music and the Journal of Music in Ireland

Publications about Tunepal

• Duggan, B., Su, N.M., 2014. TuneTracker: Tensions in the Surveillance of Traditional Music, in: Proceedings of the ACM Conference on Designing Interactive Systems (DIS’14). ACM, Vancouver, BC, Canada.
• Duggan, B., O’Shea, B., 2011. Tunepal: searching a digital library of traditional music scores. OCLC Systems & Services 27, 284–297.
• Duggan, B., 2010. Tunepal: the traditional musician’s toolbox. Presented at the Proceedings of the second workshop on eHeritage and digital art preservation, ACM, pp. 25–30.
• Duggan, B., O’Shea, B., 2010. Tunepal – Disseminating A Music Information Retrieval System To The Traditional Irish Music Community. Proceedings of the Eleventh International Society for Music Information Retrieval Conference (ISMIR 2010), Utrecht, Netherlands.
• Duggan, D.B., 2010. Content Based Music Information Retrieval:: Query-By-Playing Systems for Traditional Irish Music. LAP LAMBERT Academic Publishing.
• Duggan, B., Gainza, M., O’Shea, B., Cunningham, P., 2009. Compensating for Expressiveness in Queries to a Content Based Music Information Retrieval System. 2009 International Computer Music Conference.
• Duggan, B., 2009. Machine Annotation of Traditional Irish Dance Music. Dublin Institute of Technology.
• Duggan, B., O’Shea, B., Cunningham, P., 2008. A system for automatically annotating traditional Irish music field recordings, in: International Workshop on Content-Based Multimedia Indexing, 2008. CBMI 2008. Presented at the International Workshop on Content-Based Multimedia Indexing, 2008. CBMI 2008, IEEE, pp. 25–32. doi:10.1109/CBMI.2008.4564923
• Duggan, B., Gainza, M., O’Shea, B., Cunningham, P., 2008. Machine Annotation of Sets of Traditional Irish Dance Tunes. Ninth International Conference on Music Information Retrieval (ISMIR), Drexel University, Philadelphia, USA.
• Zheng, N., Duggan, B., 2007. A Combinational Creativity Approach to Composing Traditional Irish Reels. 18th Irish Conference on Artificial Intelligence and Cognitive Science, Dublin Institute of Technology, Ireland.
• Duggan, B., 2007b. Enabling Access to Irish Traditional Music Archives on a PDA. Eight Annual Irish Educational Technology Users Conference, DIT Bolton St, Ireland.
• Duggan, B., 2007a. A Portable Tune Teaching Tool for Traditional Musicians. DIT Annual Showcase of Learning & Teaching Activities.
• Duggan, B., 2006. Learning Traditional Irish Music using a PDA. IADIS Mobile Learning Conference, Trinity College Dublin.

History of Tunepal

Older versions of Tunepal, without the online database of tunes or query-by-playing functionality exist for Windows Mobile Pocket PC and Psion handheld computers. Jerry Everard has written a nice review of Tunepal for Windows Mobile here.

Tunepal on Windows Mobile:

 

  

Some screenshots of Tunepal running on the Psion Series 5:

 

Downloads

• Tunepal for  Windows Mobile. Use the password hairymolly to register for the full version of Tunepal.
• MIDI Patch files required for Tunepal for Windows Mobile.
• Tunepal for Psion