  This work focuses on the topic of melodic characterization and similarity in
a specific musical repertoire: a cappella flamenco singing, more specifically
in debla and martinete styles. We propose the combination of manual and
automatic description. First, we use a state-of-the-art automatic transcription
method to account for general melodic similarity from music recordings. Second,
we define a specific set of representative mid-level melodic features, which
are manually labeled by flamenco experts. Both approaches are then contrasted
and combined into a global similarity measure. This similarity measure is
assessed by inspecting the clusters obtained through phylogenetic algorithms
algorithms and by relating similarity to categorization in terms of style.
Finally, we discuss the advantage of combining automatic and expert annotations
as well as the need to include repertoire-specific descriptions for meaningful
melodic characterization in traditional music collections.
