A Fun Way to Find Irish Tune Names Online

Did you ever hear an Irish tune at a session and wonder what it was called? Well, not surprisingly the internet offers a solution to that quandary.

I recently discovered a website called Midomi.com, and it’s a search engine just for melodies.
You click a button on the screen and sing the tune so that your computer’s microphone can pick it up. You’ll see a yellow sound wave while you’re singing. It works best if you keep the tune going for the full ten seconds until it says it’s analyzing. Then it will search for matches.
It works really well for pop songs, but I tried it out for several Irish tunes just to see what would happen.
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Amazingly these songs popped right up in the results when I sang them:

• Siúil a Rún
• Loch Lomond
• Danny Boy
• Morning Has Broken
• The Foggy Dew
• What Shall We Do With a Drunken Sailor
• Down by the Sally Gardens

Some others I tried didn’t come up:

• Rising of the Moon
• Tell Me Ma
• The Butterfly

That’s because a lot of the database comes from people contributing songs. There’s a “studio” on the site where people can add tunes. It requires you to download Flash Player, which can be a virus hazard if you don’t do it right. I didn’t want to deal with the computer complications at the moment. So I can’t report directly on that.

But I did try some other methods to test tunes. Humming or whistling a tune both work equally well. And playing a tune on my tin whistle also worked.

Now you have an online way to identify many Irish tunes. But if you ever run into one you can’t find anywhere, you can always come out to one of our sessions and ask us. We’re at Nail Creek Pub in Utica on the first Tuesday of each month and at Stockdale’s in Oriskany on the third Tuesdays. Both sessions start at 7:30pm and generally run until about 10:00pm.
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You can see our full calendar of events here.

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Post by Sue Romero
Sue plays bodhrán and tin whistle with Craobh Dugan and serves as the group's Public Relations Officer.