Making Searchable Melodies: Human versus Machine

Systems that find music recordings based on hummed or sung, melodic input are called Query-By-Humming (QBH) systems. Such systems employ search keys that are more similar to a cappella singing than the original recordings. Successful deployed systems use human computation to create these search keys: hand-entered MIDI melodies or recordings of a cappella singing. Tunebot is one such system. In this paper, we compare search results using keys built from two automated melody extraction system to those gathered using two populations of humans: local paid singers and Amazon Turk workers.