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Here you can read about and download my software for traditional Irish musicians. Some of this work was developed towards my PhD on the topic of Machine Annotation of Traditional Irish Music, which I hope to complete this year.

"as we enjoy great advantages from the inventions of others, we should be glad of an opportunity to serve others by any invention of ours; and this we should do freely and generously" - Benjamin Franklin

TANSEY - Turn ANnotation from SEts using SimilaritY profiles

A set in traditional Irish music is a sequence of two or more dance tunes in the same time signature, where each tune is repeated an arbitrary number of times. A turn in a set represents the point at which either a tune repeats or a new tune is introduced. Tunes in sets are played in a segue (without an interval) and so detecting the turn is a significant challenge. The TANSEY algorithm is a novel algorithm for identifying turns in sets of traditional Irish music. TANSEY works on digitised audio files of monophonic flute and tin-whistle music. If you want to try out this algorithm yourself download and install MATT2. Edit the file matt.properties and set the value setsHeuristic=true.

TANSEY Test Audio

The Tunes. Warning! These are 16 bit, 44100 mono uncompressed WAV files and hence are very big!
  1. (Cooley's, Dick Gossip's, The Bird in the Bush)
  2. Ms McGuinness, George Whites, the Virginia
  3. The Old Copperplate, the New Copperplate
  4. Brendan Tonre's and the Killavil
  5. Connie O Connell's, The Cullen Jig, The Cordal Jig
  6. Galway Rambler, the London Lassies
  7. Geese in the Bog, the Connaughtman's Rambles, the Black Rogue
  8. Down the Broom, the Gatehouse Maid
  9. The Skylark, Roaring Mary
  10. The Humours of Ballyconnell

Publications on TANSEY

(TANSEY is called MATS in my ISMIR paper)

  • Bryan Duggan, Brendan O'Shea, Mikel Gainza, Padraig Cunningham, "The Annotation of Traditional Irish Dance Music using MATT2 and TANSEY", The 8th Annual Information Technology & Telecommunication Conference, Galway Mayo Institute of Technology, Galway, Ireland, October 2008PDF
  • B. Duggan, B. O'Shea, Mikel Gainza and P. Cunningham, "Machine Annotation of Sets of Traditional Irish Dance Tunes", Accepted for the Ninth International Conference on Music Information Retrieval (ISMIR), Drexel University, Philadelphia, USA, September 2008. PDF

MATT2 - Machine Annotation of Traditional Tunes

MATT2 is a novel system which can automatically annotate field recordings of traditional Irish music with useful metadata such as tune name, key signature, time signature, composer and discography. MATT2 works by using a number of algorithms to automatically transcribe digital audio to be annotated to the ABC music notation language. It then compares these transcriptions against a corpus of 2000 human made transcriptions in ABC using a variation of the edit distance algorithm. Results using MATT2 to annotate sixty recordings of flute and fiddle tunes demonstrate a high success rate at annotating recordings made by different musicians. Additionally, several of the recordings successfully annotated in testing MATT2 were recorded in imperfect conditions, with badly degraded audio.

Publications on MATT2

  • B. Duggan, B. O'Shea, and P. Cunningham, “A System for Automatically Annotating Traditional Irish Music Field Recordings,” the Sixth International Workshop on Content-Based Multimedia Indexing, Queen Mary University of London, UK, Jun. 2008 PDF

Installing MATT2

Install the latest version of the Java Runtime Environment.

Download MATT2.

Using ABC files transcribed by Henrik Norbeck
http://www.norbeck.nu/abc
Uses ABC4J by Lionel Gueganton
http://code.google.com/p/abc4j

Unzip all the files to a folder on your computer and click on PhD.bat to run. To annotate a live query:

  1. Press Live Query and play a tune, part of a tune or a set of tunes.
  2. This will save a WAV file of the recording to the folder tunometer/wavs. This file is likely to be big as its
    recorded in mono 44100Khz 16 bit resolution.
  3. Click Transcribe to transcribe an approximation of the tune to the ABC language
  4. Click Find to search for the transcription in the corpus.
  5. Search results get displayed in order of similarity to the transcription.
  6. Double click on a file to see the ABC, or click Play to play it.
  7. You can add more tunes to the corpus by dropping ABC files into the folder searchCorpus. Don't forget
    to click Reindex in the program otherwise MATT2 won't search the files.
  8. This software should be considered Alpha, in other words not extensively tested. It works really well with Flute
    and whistle queries. It may (but probably wont) work with other instruments.

Try editing the file matt.properties and clicking on the other buttons to change how the program works.

A Combinational Creativity Approach to Composing Traditional Irish Reels

In this work we present a system that uses a corpus of 864 traditional Irish reels as input into an algorithm that composes new tunes. The system performs a structural analysis of the tunes in the corpus and also counts n-gram note sequences in the tunes. It then recombines n-gram note sequences together in structures from the corpus to generate new tunes. The generated tunes were evaluated by 29 domain experts.

Listen to and evaluate the generated tunes!

Publications

  • Zheng N, Duggan, B: A Combinational Creativity Approach to Composing Traditional Irish Reels, 18th Irish Conference on Artificial Intelligence and Cognitive Science 29th - 31st August 2007, Dublin Institute of Technology PDF

TunePal

TunePal is 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.

Publications

  • Duggan, B: Enabling Access to Irish Traditional Music Archives on a PDA, Eight Annual Irish Educational Technology Users Conference, DIT Bolton St. Ireland, May 23rd - May 25th 2007 PDF
  • Duggan, B: TunePal: A Portable Tune Teaching Tool for Traditional Musicians, DIT Annual Showcase of Learning & Teaching Activities, January, 2007 PDF
  • Duggan, B.: Learning Traditional irish Music using a PDA, IADIS Mobile Learning Conference, Trinity College, Dublin, Ireland, July 2006,

To download TunePal, see the TunePal homepage.

MATT1 - Machine Articulation of Traditional Tunes

MATT1 uses a combination of case based reasoning and wave table synthesis to simulate the creative interpretation of traditional Irish tunes on the wooden flute. This was early work on on my PhD, but I have abandoned this idea for now.

MATT1 Publications

  • Duggan, B., Zheng, C., Cunningham, P.: MATT - A System for Modelling Creativity in Traditional Irish Flute Playing, Third Joint Workshop on Computational Creativity, ECAI'06, Italy, August 2006, PDF

Last Updated: 5 October 2008
Contact me at: bryan.duggan@dit.ie