Durable products | Brad Frost
Wherein Brad says some kind words about The Session. And slippers.
Slippers are cool.
Link tags: thesession
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Playlist J (part 2) – The Irish Mandolin – a website from Aidan Crossey
I had fun coming up five trad music tracks related to the letter J.
geoTrad - Google My Maps
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
abc to SVG | CSS-Tricks
Aw, this is so nice! Chris points to the way that The Session generates sheet music from abc text:
The SVG conversion is made possible entirely in JavaScript by an open source library. That’s the progressive enhancement part. Store and ship the basic format, and let the browser enhance the experience, if it can (it can).
Here’s another way of thinking of it: I was contacted by a blind user of The Session who hadn’t come across abc notation before. Once they realised how it worked, they said it was like having alt text for sheet music! 🤯
Sessions Map
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.
Banjos and Discrete Technologies | stevebenford
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).
The Infinite Trad Session
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.
The Long Web by Jeremy Keith – An Event Apart Video on Vimeo
This is a talk I gave at An Event Apart about eighteen months ago, all about irish music, the web, long-term thinking, and yes, you guessed it—progressive enhancement.
The Long Web - Jeremy Keith at FOWD NYC 2013 - YouTube
There were some technical difficulties with microphones, and it was a bit weird presenting inside a cinema, but I still had fun yapping on at last year’s Future Of Web Design in New York.
The Best Thing I Ever Created by Jeremy Keith on The Shutterstock Blog
Shutterstock are running a series on their blog called “The Best Thing I Ever Created” and they asked me for a contribution. So I wrote about The Session.
Session.Org session SSWC'07 - a photoset on Flickr
This is simply marvelous! A meatspace gathering of musicians that know each other threw the Irish music website I run, The Session. I wish I could have been there.
