The Voice of Music

A melody is a sequence of pitches arranged in time. It is the horizontal dimension of music — notes moving one after another, creating a recognizable musical sentence. If rhythm is the heartbeat, melody is the voice. It is what you sing in the shower, what you whistle walking down the street.

Great melodies share certain properties. They tend to move in small intervals (steps) more than large ones (leaps). After a leap, they usually reverse direction. They have a clear contour — a shape when you draw the pitches on a graph.