A system for automatically annotating traditional Irish music field recordings

This paper presents 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 860 human made transcriptions in ABC using a variation of the edit distance algorithm. Results using MATT2 to annotate fifty 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.