A presen

1. Dr Bryan Duggan
DIT School of Computing
bryan.duggan@dit.ie
@ditcomputing
http://tunepal.org
http://facebook.com/tunepal
http://tunepal.wordpress.com

4. What is Tunepal?
• The worlds leading search
engine for traditional Irish
music
• Available on
iOS, Android, iPad &
Online (through a
browser)
• Supports title searches &
music searches
• 17,135 tunes from
different collections (&
growing)
• Around 10,000 mobile
users (growing at a rate of

6. What is traditional music?
• Mostly dance music (Reels, Jigs, Hornpipes,
Polkas etc.)
• Monophonic, Repetition
• Conversational quality
• Mostly in 2 octaves
• Limited range of keys & modes
• Quite a large corpus (~8000 tunes)
• Uilleann pipes, flute, fiddle, concertina, bodhran,
banjo
• Mostly listening music nowadays

7. Collections
• (Petrie 1855; Bunting 1843; Joyce 1909) X:422
• The Music of Ireland, The Dance Music T:Come West Along the Road
R:reel
of Ireland – 1001 Gems (O’Neill, 1903) S:Session
(O’Neill, 1907) H:See also #432, in A. This version is
also played in A.
• Ceol Rince Na hÉireann H:1st part similar to "Over the Moor
to Peggy", #710
– (Breathnach 1963; Breathnach 1976; D:Arcady: Many Happy Returns
Breathnach 1985; Breathnach 1996; D:Noel Hill & Tony McMahon: 'I gCnoc
na Gra'i
Breathnach 1999) Z:id:hn-reel-422
• ABC M:C|
K:G
– (Walshaw 2007) d2BG dGBG|~G2Bd efge|d2BG dGBG|1 ABcd
edBc:|2 ABcd edBd||
• O’Neills (1997-2000) in ABC |:g2bg egdg|(3efg dg edBd|1 g2bg
egdB|ABcd edBd:|2 gabg efge|dega
– (Chambers 2007) bage||
– Norebeck (1997-2000)

9. Way back in 1993…

10. The First Tunepals

11. Part Time PhD
• Modelling creativity in traditional Irish music
– MATT - A System for Modelling Creativity in
Traditional Irish Flute Playing
– A Combinational Creativity Approach to
Composing Traditional Irish Reels
• Modelling ornamentation & expressivness
• I was working the problem of transcription
• And then one Wednesday afternoon…

12. MATT2

14. How does it work?
• Transcription
– DSP
– ODCF (Onset detection)
– Pitch detection (peak
picking, harmonicity)
– Matching (Edit Distance)

15. Compensating for expressiveness
• Ornamentation
• The long note
• Reversing/doubling
• Phrasing/breaths
• Tempo deviation
• Background noise/instruments
• Most common instruments

16. Contributions
• MATT2 Worked! (Success rate of 92%)
• TANSEY (Turn ANnotation from SEts using
similaritY Profiles)
• ~1500 tune corpus
• Ornamentation
Filtering

18. July 2009

19. tunepal.org

20. Tunepal for iOS/Android
• Tunes in the “cloud”
• Query-by-playing and title
• Released February 2010
• $4.99 on the app store
• Access 17,000+ tunes on a mobile device
• Geocoding

21. How does it work?
• Native iPhone/Android clients
• ABC2MIDI, ABC2PS, ABC4J, ABCJS
• FMOD (iOS)
• Android NDK
• Transcription on the device
• Edit distance searches on the server
• MySQL/Apache/Tomcat/PHP

22. Archiceture

26. Users in 30+ countries!
Query
Country
Count
Ireland 10,613
USA 9,093
UK 4,507
Canada 1,136
Australia 1,046
France 987
Germany 804
Japan 695
Denmark 209
Netherlands 195
Spain 165
Sweden 148
Italia 126
New Zealand 98
Croatia 66
Switzerland 58
Romania 43
Norway 41
India 39
South Africa 23

27. Analytics
• 184,160 iOS music searches
• 70,521 Web searches
• 52,484 Android searches
• 330 music searches each day
• 232 title searches per day
• 17,135 scores downloaded
• ~10,000 mobile users
• Average 400 music searches per day
• Average 400 title searches per day
• ~300 downloads per month

28. Irish Queries by Time of Day
1600
1400
1200
1000
800
600
400
200
0
0 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18 19 20 21 22 23

29. In the media
• Irish Times (twice)
• Irish Daily mail
• Sunday Times - Top twenty
cultural apps
• Foinse
• Top 25 grossing apps on
iTunes (2 days)
• Top 50 grossing apps on
iTunes (1 week)

32. ISMIR2010

34. Sunday Times - February 2012

35. John Creedon
• http://www.youtube.com/user/skooter500?fe
ature=mhee#p/u/3/UGj1xjCk7Q4

36. A grant
• Tunepal HD
• Marco Cascorina
• Morgan Conlan
• Jonathan Lynch
• Jamie Osler
• Lisa Shields

37. Listening to ClareFM.ie this morning.
Heard a great tune…..interrupted by the Galway Races Used Tunepal……..it’s called The
Parting………got it from The Session.org. So much fun……….. listening and learning Irish
Trad.
Thank you so much for the good you have done and are doing!
It is ironic, but one of my mates has proudly proclaimed she has never had a cell
phone, computer, nor opened an email account. She is utterly fascinated with Tunepal
“I’m sure you’re getting emails every day saying how much folks love your tunepal site and
iphone app. I have the app and LOVVVVVVVVVE it! I use it every day. Awesome
awesome awesome!
Getting a lot of use out of this app now. Everybody I have told so far is very impressed.”
It’s pure magic. Thanks a million for having made this diamond and share it with everyone.
If there was a God, I’m quite sure that he would have you blessed !
I just wanted to thank you for the great idea and the great job you’ve done with Tunepal.
It’s an excellent and very useful tool. Just what I whished for quite often.
I am really impressed with the app. It was 100% correct in identifying tunes when I played
them on flute or whistle. Having worked in a previous life in ultrasonic testing of
materials, I can appreciate some of the problems involved.

38. The roadmap
• Tap to record
• Tunepal for Android tablets
• Transposition invariant searches
• Retina graphics & better usability
• Black background record screen
• Tune sorting
• Events (geo)
• Tune synching across
devices
• Musician finder service
• Native browser record & DSP

39. • New collections
– Ryan’s Mammoth
collection)
– ‘Ancient Irish Music’, ed.
P. W. Joyce (Dublin, 1873)
– ‘The Feis Ceoil Collection
of Irish Airs’
– ‘O’Farrell’s Collection of
National Irish Music for
the Union
Pipes’

41. Conclusions
• Mobile device is the right platform for this
technology
– Always on internet,
– CPU technology
– GPS
– Screen size
• Having a significant impact on how musicians
learn tunes and acquire repertoire
• Making Apps is great fun, lots of nice things will
happen to you

42. Learn
programming

43. More information?
tunepal.org
facebook.com/tunepal
tunepal.wordpress.com
www.comp.dit.ie/bduggan
Search iTunes or Google Play for
Tunepal