Melodic comparison is an activity central to the study of music from many times and places. The use of machine-readable information to facilitate such comparison is disclosing significant lapses in our under standing of melody. In ordinary parlance, we often speak of melodies, tunes, and themes interchangeably, but in many repertories it is neither appropriate to consider them to be interchangeable nor is it correct to consider that an incipit represents any of them. Yet the computer process of data comparison could treat any of these melodic phenomena simi larly with just cause. As musical information, they all involve pitch and durational elements. The critical issues, in fact, in machine comparisons concern which attributes to take to be defining. In some computer con texts, ?melody? means a pitch contour devoid of rhythmic information. In others, accentual information, which must be enconded separately from the music itself, may be essential to the recognition of melodies the ear would consider to be similar. The aims of this session were to share proven techniques for the management and analysis of such information, to report results from their use in highly diverse repertories, and to pose theoretical and practi cal questions raised in recent research. The six formal papers presented concentrated on three topics ?melodic segmentation, melodic compari son, and melodic concordances. The formal presentations, which are summarized here, were supplemented by software demonstrations given on April 7 [see Appendix]. The full texts of the presentations will be published separately.