Melody

Melody

Tones tell tales.

Music is the melody to which the world is the text. —Arthur Schopenhauer

Melody is a useful tool for identifying connections needed to tie various elements together and communicate the whole picture.

A song’s melody is often its most memorable and recognizable part—it’s what you sing along to or whistle or hum after the fact. It’s what lives in your memory long after you think you’ve forgotten it, quickly resurfacing whenever you’re confronted with just a couple of notes. Melody is like the first principles of a piece of music: you can change many other aspects, but if the melody is the same, the music is still recognizable.

Nolan Gasser says melody “may be likened to a…human face. Like a face, each melody is unique, with its own character, sharing traits with those related to it and those not.”

Melody is a succession of notes arranged into a musical phrase. A phrase in music is similar to a phrase in writing—it’s a group of words that make sense together and communicate something but are not a complete sentence. So, a melodic phrase is a group of notes that make sense together and communicate a certain musical idea, and a melody can develop through related phrases. Melodies usually contain a small pause between phrases.

Many compositions use recurring melodic material. The notes that you hear in a piece of music that form the line through time are the melody: the horizontal presentation of pitch. Embellishments can decorate a melodic line without being essential to recognizing it, though a melody can also remain recognizable when some of its own notes change. What is amazing is that we are good at picking out the melody even in songs we’ve never heard before, regardless of how much else is going on in a song. John Powell writes, “In a harmonized piece of music there are so many possible tunes going on simultaneously that our ability to spot the one the composer had in mind is astonishing.” But most of us do it with ease.

Being able to assume, predict, and anticipate is central to our ability to perceive a string of notes as a melody. We’re also good at knowing where a melody won’t go, Powell observes: “Even when we can’t forecast the exact note, we can be pretty confident certain notes are unlikely.” Philip Ball says, “Everything we value in a melody (and in a soccer match) comes from the relationships between the elements that constitute it, and the context we create for them from the knowledge and expectation we bring to the experience of perceiving it.” We like to have a balance between familiarity and surprise.

We process melody the same way we process other types of information: we unconsciously look for patterns. We chunk notes together. We make sense of the notes we are hearing in the context of the notes we’ve just heard. We build up an expectation of what we think we might hear. We also compare what we are hearing to the memories we have of music we’ve heard before.

The four main skills used in identifying melody are:

• Similarity
• Proximity
• Good continuation
• Common fate

Whatever instrument is producing the melody has a distinct sound, so we group together all of the sounds made by that instrument, even if it’s a voice. We follow the sounds through time as the melody progresses. Powell explains, “A tune [melody] is always on its way somewhere,” and our natural pattern-seeking powers help us follow that journey.

Listening to music is actually a very active process. “So when we listen to a melody unfold,” Ball writes, “we hear each note in the light of many remembered things: what the previous note was, whether the melodic contour is going up or down, whether we’ve heard this phrase (or one like it) before in the piece, whether it seems like a response to the previous phrase or a completely new idea.” We keep ahold of what has come before in our minds as we process each note in order to understand the story of that melody.

It is often assumed that musicians composing lyrical music create a melody to match words they have written. But some actually start with the melody, then write lyrics to match. Musician David Byrne says of his process for writing a few of his songs, “I filled page after page with phrases [lyrics] that matched the melodic lines of the verses and choruses, hoping that some of them might complement the feelings the music generated.” When a strong connection occurs, the lyrics and the music combine to make the melody memorable—not merely as an intellectual activity, but because of the emotional impact.

We have all experienced the phenomenon of hearing a song and having it instantly remind us of a particular moment of feeling. Experiencing similar feelings too can conjure up that same song. Because melodies are often tied with emotion in our memories, we easily pick songs to set specific moods or relive episodes in our lives upon hearing a line of music.

What we like in terms of melody is often culturally influenced rather than purely a matter of individual taste. Melodies are public, in the sense that large groups of people often have a similar understanding of and attraction to a melody. Music scholar Gino Stefani writes, “Why is a melody truly popular?…Because it is better suited than others for appropriation, in more ways, for more purposes.” Whether it’s because a melody is great for selling a variety of products, or because it can conjure up a variety of emotions and feelings that we enjoy having, there are some melodies that have exhibited exceptional staying power.

Melodies thus are something shared among groups of people who are otherwise different; they transcend many disparate identities. The French philosopher Jean-Jacques Rousseau thought that melodies could be used in political organization, that they were a way of having something in common without everyone needing to be the same.

Occasionally, when a melody gets too persistent and haunts us to death, one can fight it with its own weapon; that is, with another melody. —Gino Stefani