Have you ever wondered why you can listen to a melody you’ve never heard before and it just makes sense?
Think about it. Every new melody supposedly starts from scratch—a brand-new sequence of notes nobody has ever heard before. And yet, something in your brain tracks it so fluently that you can tell instantly when a performer hits a wrong note. You don’t need a music degree. You just hear it.
Which raises an interesting question: how do you know? How can you tell the performer made a mistake, rather than the composer deliberately writing in a wacky surprise as part of a genius musical statement?
The answer is simple: melody has a vocabulary.
Composers and improvisers don’t assemble tunes one note at a time—any more than a tailor builds a garment one thread at a time, or a novelist writes one letter at a time. They work with established structural patterns.
Rather than learning this vocabulary through deliberate study, we absorb it. Through a lifetime of singing, playing, and listening, these patterns become second nature to our musical instincts. They are so deeply embedded in our culture that we rarely notice how they shape what we hear.
And yet, they do. How else can we explain why the exact same melodic figures appear again and again, echoing across centuries, genres, and styles?
A melodic vocabulary exists. It’s been hiding in plain sight until now.
Click on any figure to hear how it sounds in melodies across centuries, genres, and styles.
[THE VMT TABLE]
So what do you do with a vocabulary you’ve been speaking your whole life without knowing it? Start using it, of course! Here are just three ways.
[1] Get stuck less often.
How often do you start off with a killer first idea, but then … crickets.
If you’re like me, you just start chipping away like a golfer caught in a sand trap, trying to find a way to whack your way back onto the green? Problem is, we automatically resort to our favorite three or four go-to patterns. But they don’t always work. Do they?
Enter the vocabulary of melody.
Why not audition a few figures from the Vocabulary of Melody Table (VMT)? Start with a few you don’t usually use and see if they pique your imagination. But there’s another way to work.
Creators have long known that restriction can be a powerful tool to break through writers’ block. My upcoming course in melody writing will show dozens of such restrictions. Today, I’ll focus on figure shape.
When I look at the first three figures in this opening gesture, I see that I’ve used melodic figures that don’t change direction. That is, all three or four notes go in a straight line. Look at the table and you’ll discover that’s hardly a uniform characteristic.
What if I restrict myself to continuing the melody using only straight line figures? Here are three options. I wouldn’t have come up with any of them without posing that little puzzle for myself.
[example]
[2] Make a dull (or too-predictable) melody more interesting.
Sometimes the most obvious follow-up to an initial idea feels PERFECT. But not always. Too often, the direct route is so obvious it’s embarrassing. Take this pair of gestures, for instance.
[example]
And here are two better alternatives—figures I probably wouldn’t have thought of using without using the VMT.
[example]
Full disclosure. When I fed my boring melody into Suno, it put all three versions together and suddenly it doesn’t sound boring. Turns out I have a terrible problem: I can’t write anything that sounds bad.
[example]
[3] Pull techniques from melodies you love.
Each of the figures on the table above has one or two “normal” and several “modified” behaviors. In general, the normal behavior produces an easy-going effect—letting us quietly groove with the overall flow. Taking some alternative path produces a number of different effects: each unexpected turn a bit more expressive in its own way.
Bad Bunny uses the most expected outcome of the Return Figure. That doesn’t mean his tune is boring or simplistic. Hardly. He’s a master at metric phasing: taking a small melodic idea and restarting it so what first felt accented suddenly feels out of kilter. Just saying, don’t undersell Bad Bunny.
Still, Bach’s melody uses the same opening melodic figure, but hardly in the same way. And it’s not just the unexpected connection. Most composers wait until later on in a melody before taking such a crazy turn. But when you get a trustworthy urge to do something bold and know you can get away with it, why not?
[example]
The three examples above barely scratch the surface. Melodic figures aren’t just patterns—they’re agents. Each one has characteristic ways of moving, connecting, and behaving that composers across centuries have exploited to charm, surprise, and move their listeners. Learning to work with that behavior—consciously, intentionally—is where melody writing stops feeling like guesswork and starts feeling like craft.
That’s exactly what the FOM course in melody writing is designed to teach. It’s coming soon. If you want to be among the first to know when it launches, [sign up here].
In the meantime, two sister posts go deeper into the world of melodic figures:
Why Haven’t We Heard of Melodic Figures Before?
Be the first to know. The FOM course in melody writing is in development. If you’d like to hear when it launches, drop your email below.
