Interactive Scores

Download the Scorch plugin and you will instantly be able to see and play back traditional music scores provided by ITMA. The Archive is adding scores from historical collections to this area on an ongoing basis.

There are lots of user-friendly ways to view and play back these scores. You can start, pause and stop playback anywhere you want in a score, skip forwards or backwards quickly in it, change its playback tempo or change its key. An ideal learning environment!

Latest Scores: Tunes of the Munster Pipers Our latest Scorch files below are the first 200 tunes from Tunes of the Munster pipers: Irish traditional music from the James Goodman manuscripts, Volume 1, edited by Dr Hugh Shields and published by ITMA in 1998.  It contains all the melodies which Goodman himself noted down from the pipers and other performers of his native province, together with an essay on his life and career based on new research. (for information click here).

Interactive controls are simple to use. They appear above the music in every score, and the icons mimic the familiar controls that you know from your CD player or digital music player.

• Playback: use the ‘Play’ button to start playback at the beginning of a score, or click anywhere in a score to play it back from that point. Helpfully, a cursor follows the course of the playback, so that you always know where you are in a score.

• Stopping and pausing playback: use the ‘Stop’ and ‘Pause’ buttons to either end playback or simply stop it for a moment.

• Moving quickly through a score: use the ‘Rewind’ and ‘Fast Forward’ buttons to quickly skip through the score in either direction.

• Changing the speed of the music: use the tempo slider to slow down or speed up a piece of music to a pace that suits you – without changing the key.

• Changing the key: use the ‘Transpose’ button to change the key to a pitch that suits you or your instrument.