Creating data resources for designing usercentric frontends for query-by-humming systems

Advances in music retrieval research greatly depend on appropriate database resources and their meaningful organization. In this paper we describe data collection efforts related to the design of query-by-humming (QBH) systems. We also provide a statistical analysis for categorizing the collected data, especially focusing on intersubject variability issues. In total, 100 people participated in our experiment, resulting in around 2000 humming samples drawn from a predefined melody list consisting of 22 different well-known music pieces and over 500 samples of melodies that were chosen spontaneously by our subjects. These data are being made available to the research community. The data from each subject were compared to the expected melody features, and an objective measure was derived to quantify the statistical deviation from the baseline. The results showed that the uncertainty in human humming varies depending on the musical structure of the melodies and the musical background of the subjects. Such details are important for designing robust QBH systems. Permission to make digital or hard copies of all or part of this work for personal or classroom use is granted without fee provided that copies are not made or distributed for profit or commercial advantage and that copies bear this notice and full citation on the first page. To copy otherwise, or republish, to post on servers, or to redistribute to lists requires prior specific permission and/or a fee.