When "Everything" is Information: Irish Traditional Music and Information Retrieval

Abstract

As a global phenomenon, Irish traditional music has a tremendous following, while practitioners of Irish traditional music often disagree on shared aspects of their music culture. This provides numerous challenges when organizing traditional Irish traditional music for retrieval purposes. This paper describes the music information seeking and retrieval (MIR) challenges of Irish traditional music in terms of the physical paradigm and user-centered relevance, using TheSession.org as an example. Limitations of the physical paradigm are addressed, both related to the traditional music subject matter, and how current MIR systems fall short in their attempts to manage Irish traditional music. Additional discussions of user-centered relevance contextualize the problems related to music information seeking and retrieval with traditional musics. In the future, representations of music objects connected as linked open data, combined with multiple query capabilities, may provide a robust and flexible structure for traditional music information seeking and retrieval.

What everybody knows: embodied information in serious leisure

“…Perhaps this is unsurprising, since documents such as sheet music, audio recordings and films have long been central to sharing musical knowledge. But developing an understanding of all kinds of information in music practice and performance will likely require moving beyond the traditional physical document paradigm (see Weissenberger, 2014) or rethinking what constitutes a musical document, especially considering the recent innovative information technologies that take advantage of the multi-media and multi-modal qualities of music. This creates both new opportunities and problems for musicians.…”