Melody In Music

All musical genres use the same musical tools and techniques. All the different musical cultures use similar approaches to make good music. In this article we are going to focus on how music works in terms of melody. Melody is at the heart of music as it touches our emotions. A baby recognizes a tune the mother sang while the baby was still in the womb. Tunes can convey emotions in both spiritual and secular music.

So what makes a good melody so effective? The musical systems of the world sound very different at first glance. On the contrary, some melodic principles are universal for every culture on Earth. They all share something simple and intense. All the music of the world are based on 5 notes; they share this in common. In the West, we call these 5 notes pentatonic after the ancient Greek word for five, pentas.

It’s easy to find the pentatonic notes on a keyboard because they are the black flat and sharp notes. A lot of anthem tunes have been based on the pentatonic shape. All musical cultures developed more notes than just the pentatonic notes. The key to making good music is not how many notes you use, but what you do with them.

How does melody work? There are three main ingredients to every melody—the notes you choose, how high or low they are, and the pattern they make, one note after another.

Notes – In theory, the combination of notes you choose is infinite. The number of notes you use depends on the distance you want the notes to be from one another. If you cluster the notes together too closely you may have trouble distinguishing between them. All musical world systems have chosen notes that are noticeably different.

Think of notes as a music ladder called a scale. In Western music we have 12 notes on a scale. In the Chinese and Indian musical systems you have many more notes in a scale, which means they run closely together. The more notes there are on a scale the harder it is to distinguish between them for an average listener.
The measurement of how high or low a musical note is is called pitch. The lower-pitched notes are on the left side of the keyboard; the higher-pitched notes are on the right side of the keyboard. Every 12 notes is the same note but with a different pitch. Each 12 notes is called an octave. Octaves repeat from the left side to the right side of the keyboard.