This page is maintained by
Thomas Bending,
and was last modified on 17 January 2009.
Comments, criticisms and suggestions are welcome.
Copyright © Thomas Bending 2010.
Torus is a system for organising and identifying tunes without knowing their titles. It works by indexing the tunes according to their shape, i.e. according to how they go up or down in pitch from each note to the next. This sequence of jumps up or down is represented as a string of us and ds, and this string is used to locate the tune in the index. Thus provided you can hum, whistle or play the tune you can find its title - it doesn't matter what key it's in, and you don't even need to be able to identify the intervals accurately. Here are some more details, and an example.
The Torus database contains information about mostly English and other folk music tunes. It has 1638 versions of 1303 tunes with 1593 titles, with 1568 references to 42 sources, and has 98.0% resolution. I'm very grateful to Bob Archer for contributing a large chunk of tune data, based on work done with Eric Foxley and Philip Rowe. The database was last modified on 19 May 2010. It's available for download as a CSV file (121kB) or zip file (37kB), and some information about the data format is also available. Please respect the distribution conditions.
For those times when you don't have a web browser handy, there's a Palm handheld version and a hardcopy version (now kept up to date!).
This page is maintained by
Thomas Bending,
and was last modified on 17 January 2009.
Comments, criticisms and suggestions are welcome.
Copyright © Thomas Bending 2010.