Machine Annotation of Traditional Irish Dance Music

Estimates put the canon of traditional Irish dance tunes at at least seven thousand compositions. Given this diversity, a common problem faced by musicians and ethnomusicologists is identifying tunes from recordings. This work attempts to solve this problem by developing a Content Based Music Information Retrieval (CBMIR) system adapted to the characteristics of traditional Irish dance music. Included is a comprehensive review of the domain of traditional Irish music and three chapters of related work in the fields of feature extraction, melodic similarity and music information retrieval. A new software system is presented called MATT2 (Machine Annotation of Traditional Tunes) whose goal is to annotate recordings of traditional Irish dance music with useful metadata. A new algorithm is also presented called TANSEY (Turn ANnotation from SEts using SimilaritY profiles) that annotates sets of tunes played segue as is the custom in traditional Irish dance music.