The shape of a melody

Most melodies you can hum move to the next note of the scale far more often than they jump.

A melody is a line of notes, one after another, that the ear follows as a single thing. You can draw it in the air with a finger: up for higher notes, down for lower ones. That drawing is called the contour of the melody, and it is the first thing people remember about a tune. Hum a song you know without the words and you will notice that you remember where it rises and falls long before you could name a single note.

Three ways to move

From one note to the next, a melody can do only three things. It can repeat the same note. It can move by step to the next note of the scale, for example from E to F or from G down to F. Or it can leap over one or more scale notes, for example from C up to E or from G down to C. Music theory books call stepwise movement conjunct motion and leaping movement disjunct motion. Repeated notes count as part of the smooth, conjunct kind.

Steps make a melody easy to sing, because the voice only has to slide a little. Leaps give it energy and make a moment stand out. A tune made only of steps can sound like a scale exercise; a tune made only of leaps sounds like a bugle call and is hard to sing. Many well-loved melodies mix the two and follow a simple habit: after a big leap, the line turns around and moves back by step, filling in part of the gap it just jumped over.

Range and the high point

The distance from the lowest to the highest note is the melody's range. A narrow range, say from C up to G, is comfortable for almost any voice. An octave, from C to the next C, is still singable for most people. Inside that range, a good melody usually saves its highest note for one special place, often a little after the middle. That high point works like the peak of a hill: the line climbs toward it, arrives, and then walks down toward the ending. If the top note appears in every bar, there is no peak any more.

Why the grid has only white keys

The song maker below offers eight rows: C, D, E, F, G, A, B and the C above. These are the notes of the C major scale, the white keys of a piano from one C to the next. Because every row belongs to the same scale, any note you place fits the key, and nothing sounds like a mistake. The lowest and highest rows are both C, the home note, called do. Melodies in C major tend to feel finished when they land on do, which is why both C rows are shaded.

Try it

The grid starts with an eight-bar arch written for this lesson. Press Play and follow the dashed melody line. The panel under the grid counts steps, leaps and repeats, names the shape and tells you which bar holds the highest note. Then change the tune: move the high C to bar 2 and listen to how the climb disappears, or replace a few steps with leaps and see the counts change. Tap a note to remove it, tap an empty cell to add one, and drag to the right to hold a note longer.