Curating and annotating a collection of traditional Irish flute recordings to facilitate stylistic analysis

Abstract

This paper presents the curation and annotation of a collection of traditional Irish flute recordings to facilitate the analysis of stylistic characteristics. We introduce the structure of Irish tunes, types of tunes and the ornamentation, which is a decisive stylistic determinant in Irish traditional music. We identify seminal recordings of prominent flute players and provide information related to players and their style and geographical context. We describe the process of manual annotation of the audio data. The annotations consist of the onsets of notes, note frequency and identity of notes and ornaments. We also present initial stylistic analysis of individual players in terms of ornamentation and phrasing and provide a variety of statistics for the data. The ability to accurately represent and analyse stylistic features such as ornaments allow for the development of discourse related to several key ethnomusicological questions surrounding music making, musical heritage and cultural change.