Estimates put the canon of traditional Irish dance tunes at at least seven thousand compositions. Given this diversity, a common problem faced by musicians and ethnomusicologists is identifying tunes from recordings. This work attempts to solve this problem by developing a Content Based Music Information Retrieval (CBMIR) system adapted to the characteristics of traditional Irish dance music. Included is a comprehensive review of the domain of traditional Irish music and three chapters of related work in the fields of feature extraction, melodic similarity and music information retrieval. A...