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Melody is a tune — Art, 7–10

A melody is a line of notes that your ear can follow and remember. Art, 7–10 years.

idea

A melody is the part of music you can hum after hearing it: perhaps a line sung by a voice or played by a flute. Its notes come one after another, with different lengths and pitches. You do not need to know the note names to follow its shape.

why

Music needed a way to make a sound-line that people could remember, repeat and recognise. A melody solves that problem: it gives a song a musical path instead of a pile of unrelated sounds. That is why a tune can stay in your head even when the words are gone.

worked example

Take the notes C–D–E–D, using one beat for each note. First, sing C, then let your voice rise to D and E. Next, return to D; the last step makes the tune feel as if it is answering itself. Change the first note to A and you have a different melody.

trap

You may think a melody is just any group of sounds played one after another. That is reasonable, because every melody uses separate sounds. The important difference is that a melody has a shape your ear can follow; random notes do not make a clear musical path.

use

Melodies help people recognise songs in films, games, adverts and phone ringtones. A short melody can tell you that a character has arrived or that a game is beginning. When you invent a tune for a poem, you are using melody to give words a memorable musical shape.

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