Have you ever wondered why you can listen to a melody you’ve never heard before and somehow 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 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.
Here’s the crazy part. Rather than learning this vocabulary through deliberate study, we absorb it. Through a lifetime of singing, playing, and listening, the patterns that make up the melodic vocabulary become musical instincts. They’re so deeply embedded in our brains and in our culture that we rarely notice how they guide 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.
So what do you do with a vocabulary you've been speaking (singing) your whole life without even knowing it? Use it, of course! Here are just three ways.
[1] Get stuck less often.
How often do you start off with a great first idea, but then … crickets.
If you’re like me, you just start chipping away like a bad golfer caught in a sand trap, trying to whack your way back onto the green. Problem is, we automatically resort to our favorite two or three go-to moves—solutions that rarely lead to break throughs; and even when they do, they rarely actually POP!
Enter the vocabulary of melody.
One way to ignite your imagination is to test drive a few figures you don’t usually use. And why? Because they’re the most likely to pique your imagination, to take you in a new direction.
So why not audition a few figures from the Vocabulary of Melody table (VOM)?
Now let me show you another, slightly more advanced technique for getting unstuck.
Creators have long known that restriction can be a powerful tool to smash through writers’ block. We can restrict any aspect of melody: harmony, register, flow, etc. Today, I’ll focus on the shape of each figure.
Pretend I came up with this opening idea for a march, then got stuck.
One way creators have applied restriction is to make a little puzzle for themselves. It takes a little practice figure out the best sort of puzzle for the tune you’re working with. In this case, I notice that the first three figures in my opening gesture have a “straight line” shape: no bends, no twists and turns. What if I restrict my figure choices to straight line figures? That feels like an interesting challenge. And it’s pretty easy to test drive. The first and third figures on the VOM table (the 3-Note Scale and the Arpeggio Figure both move in straight lines. Let’s see how they sound as responses to the opening gesture.
First, I'll try answering the initial gesture with one made from two 3-Note Scales.
Next, I'll try a 3-Note Scale and an Arpeggio.
Problem is, it’s hard to decide which one to use because I like them both. Wait a minute, what if I use them in succession? That sounds something like this.
[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.
And here are two better alternatives—figures I probably wouldn’t have thought of using without using the VOM.
Full disclosure. I tried to write a too-predictable melody. But when I fed it into Suno, it put all three versions together and suddenly it doesn’t sound boring.
[3] Steal techniques from melodies you love.
Each of the figures on the table above has one or two “straightforward” and several “modified” behaviors. In general, the straightforward 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 straightforward behavior 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 of the Return Figure. Most composers wait until later on in a melody before taking such a crazy turn. But when you get the urge to do something audacious and know you can get away with it, why not?
Now for some plagiarism. I’m going to steal Bach’s idea! Not really, I’ll just imitate his technique for making a Return Figure more expressive using a totally different set of notes.
Wrapping up. The three applications I’ve just shown barely scratch the surface of what’s possible with using melodic figures. Melodic figures aren't just patterns—they're agents —capable of acting to achieve effects or results. Each one has characteristic ways of moving, connecting, and behaving that composers across centuries have harnessed 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.
Does that mean you need to memorize all 24 figures and remember all the ways to modify them? Not at all! Keep reading.
Be the first to know. The revamp of the FOM site will contain courses in melody writing PLUS tons of ideas like the ones I just showed in this blogpost. (Including 75 ways to respond to an initial melodic idea!) If you'd like to hear when it launches, drop your email below.
In the meantime, here are two sister posts that go deeper into the world of melodic figures:
Why Haven't we Heard of Melodic Figures Before?