An examination of how sites like The Session are meshing with older ideas of traditional Irish music:
There is a very interesting tension at play here – one that speaks directly to the design of new technologies. On the one hand, Irish musicians appear to be enthusiastically adopting digital media to establish a common repertoire of tunes, while on the other the actual performance of these tunes in a live session is governed by a strong etiquette that emphasizes the importance of playing by ear.
There’s an accompanying paper called Supporting Traditional Music-Making: Designing for Situated Discretion (PDF).
This is nifty—a map of all the Irish music sessions and events happening around the world, using the data from TheSession.org.
If you’re interested in using data from The Session, there’s a read-only API and regularly-updated data dumps.
Okay, this is kind of nuts: some researchers have seeded a neural network with all the tunes from The Session. Some of the results are surprisingly okay. It’s certainly a fascinating project.
Myself and Jessica joining in some reels and jigs.
I had fun coming up five trad music tracks related to the letter J.
Well, this is a rather wonderful mashup made with data from thesession.org:
The distribution of Irish traditional tunes which reference place names in Ireland
I’ve been running an online community for two fifths of my life.
From the west coast of Clare to the World Wide Web.
Five in a row.
I was on a different kind of podcast.