Melody on the Map.

00Introduction

This guide is a companion to The Emotional Map of Melody, a book by the songwriter and producer Tamas Bodzsar about why melody notes feel the way they do. It explains the book’s ideas from the beginning, on a piano roll rather than in sheet music, and every idea comes with an example you can play.

The Book’s Subject

Most people think of a melody as a line of pitches: this note, then that one, a little higher, a little lower. The book argues that this is only the shadow of a melody. Every note in a melody also has a feel. Some notes sound settled and safe. Some lean forward, as if they want to move. Some rub against what is underneath them and give the music an edge.

Where does that feel come from? Partly from rhythm, from where each note falls in time. That is the subject of the author’s earlier book, The Rhythm Code, which has a companion guide of its own, Rhythm on the Grid.

But this book is about two other sources of feeling, which a piano roll does not show. The first is the note’s relationship with the key: where it sits in the scale the song is built from. The second is its relationship with the chord playing underneath it at that moment: whether it belongs to that chord or not. Together with rhythm, the book counts these as the three dimensions of a melody, and it puts the two new ones on a single picture, which it calls the emotional map.

The book’s larger claim is about songwriting. It argues that the balance between settled and unsettled notes is one of the main things that makes a melody sound fresh or dated, and that this balance has changed over the decades. The hits of the 1980s and 1990s, it says, landed on a note of the chord at almost every chord change, while today’s hits deliberately mix in more tension. Once you know this, you can make those choices on purpose instead of by accident.

Reading a Roll

Most examples in this guide are small piano rolls, like the one in your DAW (digital audio workstation, the software producers record and arrange in, such as Ableton Live, Logic Pro or FL Studio). Time runs from left to right, and the numbers along the top count the beats of each bar.

• The Chord row shows the chord that is playing, with its name and its Roman numeral, a way of naming chords by their place in the key that Solfège explains.
• Below it, each row is one pitch. The label at the left gives the note’s syllable, its solfège name (DO, RE, MI and so on, also explained in Solfège), and its letter name with an octave number, such as MI E5. Middle C is C4, and the number goes up by one at each C, so E5 is the E just over an octave above middle C. (On a phone, the rows show only the syllable.)
• A coloured block is a melody note. Its left edge is where it starts, and its length is how long it lasts. The colour shows its syllable, running from warm for the most settled syllables to cool for the most restless.
• A solid block belongs to the chord underneath it: it is a chord tone. A hatched block does not belong to the chord: it is a non-chord tone. Chord Tones explains both.
• A note with a dark ring round it is the note heard at a chord change. Those are the notes that matter most, for reasons explained in The Most Important Notes.
• Under the roll, the cards headed At the chord changes list those ringed notes, and many examples draw them on the emotional map as well.

The seven syllables, in the order the book ranks them from the most settled to the most restless, look like this:

You do not need to remember any of this yet. Each part is explained when it first matters.

Using the Examples

• Play starts an example and Stop ends it. Only one plays at a time.
• BPM (beats per minute) is the tempo. Use − and + to slow an example down. Slowing down makes it much easier to hear how each note sits against the chord.
• Click adds a metronome. Note names swaps the syllables on the notes for letter names.
• Where an example has versions, the buttons above the roll switch between them, even while it plays.
• The buttons beside Hear, under the roll, turn the melody, chords, bass and beat on and off. Listening to the melody and chords alone is often the clearest way to hear what a note is doing.
• Where you see Edit, you can change the melody. Click a note to select it, then move it with ▲ ▼ ◀ ▶, change its length with − and +, or delete it with ✕. Click an empty space in a row to add a note there. The cards and the map update as you go.

On a phone, tap wherever this guide says click. On an iPhone, turn the volume up; the examples are built to play even when the phone is set to silent. At the end of each chapter there is a button to mark it done, and the contents list keeps count.

The Songs

The book makes its case with well-known songs, from Phil Collins and Backstreet Boys to Taylor Swift, Dua Lipa and Billie Eilish. Their melodies belong to their writers, so they are not transcribed here. Every idea they demonstrate has an original example in this guide instead, and the chapters that discuss songs end with a table of what to listen to, what to listen for, and the page where the book discusses it. The book also offers ear-training apps on the author’s website, which is printed in the book.

In the book: pp. 5–10, What Stays When Everything Changes.

01The Lasting Power of Melody

Sounds go in and out of fashion. Production styles come and go. The book begins by asking what lasts, and its answer is the melody.

The Memorable Part

Think about the last song you could not get out of your head. What was stuck there? Almost certainly the melody: the tune of the chorus, or a line of the verse. Casual listeners rarely remember a drum sound or a synth patch, but they remember melodies, and they can enjoy a melody on its own, hummed, whistled or sung without any chords or words at all.

Melody is also very old. Long before people built instruments, they sang, and a great deal of traditional folk music is still just a voice and a tune. Together with rhythm, melody was the first music people made, and the book argues that it is still the most direct musical language we have: it reaches the emotions faster than anything else in a song.

Melody, Chords and Words

A melody is never completely on its own in a song, though. A modern song is built from three things that have to lock together: the melody, the chord progression underneath it, and the lyrics. The book calls the melody the face of the song, but the chords strongly shape how we hear that face. The same tune over different chords can sound hopeful or sad, settled or restless. Much of this guide is about exactly that.

The Limits of Production

Here is a claim that surprises many producers. No amount of production can make a generic song sound fresh. A great singer, a polished mix and the latest sounds will not rescue a melody and a chord progression that feel predictable and worn out. The reverse is also true: a well-written song still works when it is played on one guitar or one piano and sung, and it still sounds modern.

The book tells of a student who was sure that his songs needed modern sounds and effects to sound current, and who took some convincing that the modern feel was really in the melody and the chords. It also points to some of today’s biggest artists, such as The Weeknd, whose records use synths and drums that sound like the 1980s. The surface is retro, but the melodies and chord progressions underneath behave in a modern way, and that is why the records feel current rather than like a throwback. Some recent hits barely have an arrangement at all: a voice, a guitar and perhaps a light beat.

Try it with this example. The first version is a full arrangement, with a pad, a bass line and a beat. The second strips it down to the melody and a piano, the way a singer and a pianist might perform it.

The sound changes completely, but the song does not. The melody and the chords carry it in both versions. That is the book’s point: the writing is the foundation, and production is what you build on top of it.

The Author’s Route

The author describes his own route to this. As a jazz student he was taught to build melodies from scales, and he learned to play every scale in every key at great speed on the trumpet. Yet he could not write a decent melody of his own. He could play almost anything other people had written, and create nothing worth keeping.

For years after that, he says, he bought every songwriting book and course he could find, and kept meeting the same basic, outdated advice. What finally worked was the opposite approach: setting aside what school had taught him, trusting his instinct, and then analysing the melodies of very successful songs to see what they actually do. That analysis showed him something that runs through the whole book. The way successful songwriters write melodies keeps changing, and techniques that worked well ten years ago no longer work in the same way. A song can last for decades, but the tools for writing new songs go out of date.

Three Dimensions of Melody

Most people, the book says, treat melody as one-dimensional: they only think about which pitch comes next. Its comparison is a sculpture seen only as a shadow on a wall. The shadow gives you the outline, and nothing of the depth.

A melody actually has three dimensions:

• Rhythm: where each note is placed in time. The same pitches feel completely different on the beat and off it. The author’s earlier book covers this, and so does its companion guide, Rhythm on the Grid.
• The relationship with the key: which degree of the scale each note is. This guide uses solfège syllables, DO, RE, MI and so on, to name it.
• The relationship with the chords: whether each note belongs to the chord playing under it.

The book’s claim is that the last two have never been made visible, even though they decide how a melody feels. Its emotional map puts them on one picture, and the author describes the moment he first saw melody this way as like a light being switched on in a dark room. Because songs from different decades look different on that picture, the map also shows how listeners’ preferences have changed. That, the book argues, is why some new songs sound modern and others sound dated the moment you hear them.

Listening List

In the book: pp. 5–10, What Stays When Everything Changes.

02The Limits of Old Theory

If music theory explains how music works, why do so many highly trained musicians struggle to write a song that does not sound generic? The book’s answer is that most theory was built for a different job, and partly for a different era.

Theory for Players

Think how much is happening in a song at any moment: a melody, chords, a rhythm, words, perhaps a second melody weaving round the first. You might expect a well-developed theory of how all of that fits together. In fact there is surprisingly little, and the book thinks it knows why. Music schools train people to play: to perform, to master technique, and to interpret music that other people wrote. Writing a song is a different skill, and very few musicians are ever taught it step by step.

So most songwriters, even very successful ones, work largely by instinct, and the book has no quarrel with that. But think about harmony. Nobody expects a new guitarist to discover chords, scales and keys on their own; they are taught them, and that saves years of fumbling. The book wants songwriting to have the same kind of head start.

Theory as an Obstacle

The book goes further. It argues that traditional theory can actually hold a modern songwriter back. It mentions that Ryan Tedder, one of the most successful songwriters of his generation, has said he knows very little theory, and that he has watched highly trained friends find it hard to write a really strong song. The book adds that many of the biggest songwriters of the last few decades had almost no academic training.

Why would that be? Musicians who learn traditional theory tend to follow its rules, and some of those rules describe the music of the past. Writers who know no rules have nothing to follow but their own ears, and that lack of rules often leads them somewhere fresher.

None of this means theory is bad. It means you need the right theory: a way of thinking that matches how songs work today. Good theory, the book says, is a shortcut. It can spare you years of trial and error, and show you things you might never have worked out alone.

Testing the Rules

Music has changed a great deal in the last few decades, but much of what is taught in music schools is centuries old, or at least decades old. Even ten years makes a difference: the way melodies, chords and lyrics behave in today’s hits has moved on noticeably in that time. Not everything old is outdated, but some of it is.

So the book offers a simple test for any piece of theory you meet: do today’s songs actually use it, in a real and practical way? A book or video whose examples all come from decades ago deserves some suspicion. The book gives an example. A student of the author’s was told on an expensive songwriting course that every song must contain the I, IV and V chords. Those are the chords built on the first, fourth and fifth notes of the scale: in C major, C, F and G. That was largely true until the 1990s, the book says, but it is not true of today’s songs.

Lessons From History

The book looks back at classical music to show that clinging to an old style after tastes have moved on is not a new problem. Musicians of the Baroque, Classical and Romantic eras were not only performers. They composed and improvised as a matter of course, and a written score was a starting point they felt free to change. The film Amadeus has a scene, probably invented but true to the period, in which Mozart, after a single hearing, plays a march back from memory and improves it there and then. The idea of a musician who only ever plays other people’s music is largely a twentieth-century one.

Why did that change? Partly, the book suggests, because those old styles stopped speaking to new listeners, and people were slow to admit it. By the time most musicians notice that a style has had its day, the moment to move on has already passed.

Bach’s style shows how this happens. Composers kept writing in it for years after his death, but none of them made his mark, because musical taste had already moved elsewhere. Bach’s own sons wrote in a newer style, and audiences of the time preferred it. In the nineteenth century, composers such as Mendelssohn, Brahms and Reger studied Bach closely and wrote pieces in his manner, and critics called those pieces old-fashioned.

The book’s lesson is that when a style has peaked, its methods lose their power to make new music. Copying Bach is possible; making a copy of Bach feel current is not. Songwriting works the same way: a great song can stay great for ever, but the techniques used to write it do not stay fresh.

In the book: pp. 11–15, Why Traditional Music Theory Fails Songwriters.

03Seeing Melody

You can write music entirely by ear. But it is much easier to build something when you can see how it is put together, and the book argues that melody has been missing a picture of its own.

The Blueprint

The book makes a comparison with cars. When you drive a car, you are only using it, and you never need to see how it was designed. But if you are designing a car, a blueprint is essential. It would be nearly impossible to build one without some kind of plan you can look at.

Music works the same way. A listener does not need to know that a song has a verse, a pre-chorus and a chorus. But anyone who has tried to finish a song knows how much it helps to write the structure down and plan it, so that you always know which section comes next. Seeing the system underneath turns guesswork into something deliberate, and makes the whole job easier.

If you have worked through The Rhythm Code or Rhythm on the Grid, you already know how much clearer rhythm becomes once you can see the exact position of every note in the bar. The book compares working without a picture to finding your way through a maze blindfolded, and working with one to having the map in your hand. You can make music without any picture at all, but it is slower and harder.

The Limits of a Piano Roll

You might think melody already has its pictures: sheet music, or the piano roll in your DAW. But look at what they actually show. Both show the height of each note, its pitch, and when it plays. Neither shows how the note feels, or what job it is doing in the music.

Here is a short melody in two versions. The first shows it the way a DAW does, with pitch and timing only. The second shows the same notes with four things this guide adds:

• each note’s syllable, written on the note and coloured to match;
• whether the note belongs to the chord underneath: solid if it does, hatched if it does not;
• a ring on the notes heard at each chord change;
• those ringed notes drawn on the emotional map below the roll.

Switch between the two while it plays. The music is identical, but the second picture explains what you hear. The second bar has a slight ache to it, and the third bar leans forward, because the notes at those chord changes do not belong to their chords. The first picture cannot tell you that. The rest of this guide teaches you to read the second kind of picture, and then to hear what it shows without looking.

From Words to a Map

The author says he had been teaching these ideas for years, in videos and in private lessons, but only in words. Without a picture they stayed abstract: easy to talk about, hard to grasp. Then he realised that what he had been describing could be drawn. Melody, he found, can be laid out on a flat, two-dimensional map, and it becomes three-dimensional when you add rhythm.

That map is the subject of The Emotional Map. The chapters before it build up to it step by step. First comes the feeling of stability and tension in general, then the notes that matter most. Then come the map’s two axes, one at a time: the note’s relationship with the key, and its relationship with the chord.

In the book: pp. 17–19, Why Visualizing Music Changes Everything.

04Stability and Tension

Why do some moments in a song lift you, while others leave you hanging? Part of the answer is that music keeps setting up small expectations and then either meeting them or playing with them. This chapter gives you the words for that push and pull.

Naming the Feeling

Feelings in music are hard to put into words, but the book argues that it is worth trying. A feeling you can name is one you can notice, and a feeling you can notice is one you can use on purpose. There are several pairs of words for the same basic idea:

• Tension and release, or stability and instability: whether the music feels settled, or feels as if it needs to move on.
• Sweet and bitter, the author’s own favourite pair: a sweet note is pleasant and safe; a bitter one has a sharper taste.
• Calm and excitement: a long note on the beat calms things down, while a quick run that arrives early stirs them up.

Three more words describe how we follow music in time: expectation, predictability and surprise. Imagine a song building towards its chorus. You can feel the chorus coming, and that expectation keeps you listening. If it arrives exactly when you expect, the predictability is comforting. If it arrives a beat early, the surprise is exciting.

And there is contrast, which gives music its depth. A quiet passage makes the loud one that follows sound bigger, and a dark verse makes the chorus after it sound brighter. Without contrast everything sounds flat, because we feel emotion mostly through change.

The Same Push and Pull in Rhythm

If you know The Rhythm Code, you have met this already. Notes that land on the beats feel settled and expected. Anticipated notes, which arrive just before the beat, feel lively and surprising. The book says that when songwriters play with expectations like these, the listener’s brain releases dopamine, its reward chemical. (Notes on the Book looks at the evidence for that.) Either way, the experience is familiar: a melody that does something a little unexpected, but still makes sense, is satisfying.

The key is balance. If a melody resolves exactly where you expect, it feels safe. If it delays the resolution, holding you waiting a little longer, it feels exciting. But if everything is safe, the music becomes boring; and if nothing is predictable, it becomes confusing, and the listener loses touch with it. The book points out that free jazz and experimental music, for all their merits, have never been the world’s most popular styles, and that playing it too safe does not last either. Modern songs, it says, sit in the middle: familiar enough to feel grounded, surprising enough to stay interesting.

The Rubber Band

Melody notes create the same push and pull. Some notes feel calm and safe. Others feel unexpected, as if they are not quite where the music wants to be. Everyone senses this, whether or not they have ever put it into words.

The book describes the feeling as a stretch. Between the note the melody is on and the note we expect it to reach, there is a small gap, and our ear holds that gap like a stretched rubber band. When the melody gets there, the band relaxes, and there is a little moment of relief. That small cycle of stretch and release happens again and again inside a song.

Listen to it here. The first three bars of this phrase are the same in both versions. In the first, the phrase ends on RE, the second note of the scale, over a G chord, and it is left hanging, like a question. In the second, the melody moves on to DO, the home note, as the chord moves home to C, and the phrase closes.

The first version is not wrong. A phrase that ends on RE is very useful, because it makes the listener want to hear what comes next. You will see in Tension Across a Song that many verses end exactly like this, to make the chorus feel like an arrival.

The Backdrop

The chords add a second layer. A melody note never stands alone: it stands in front of a background, the chord. Change the chord under the same note and its feeling changes. The chord can support the note, so that it sounds stable, or work against it, so that it sounds unexpected.

In this example the melody plays the same E twice. The first time, the chord underneath is C major, which contains E, and the note sounds settled. The second time, the chord is D minor, which does not contain E, and the same note sounds a little less settled, as if it were rubbing gently against the chord.

This is why two melodies with exactly the same notes can feel completely different. On paper they look identical, but the chords under them shift the balance of stability and tension. Listeners never think about any of this. They simply find one song dull and another one interesting.

Moving Between the Two

The book suggests that our ears keep track of how long the music stays comfortable and how long it stays uneasy. Too much comfort, and a song starts to sound flat. Too much unease, and it becomes tiring to listen to. Modern songs, the book says, keep moving between the two in ways that mean something.

Good songwriters manage this by instinct. Without knowing any of the theory, they sense when a verse should stay a little unsettled and when a chorus should land. Once you start listening for it, a melody stops sounding like a string of notes. It sounds like a series of choices: comfort here, friction there, and a decision each time about how long to stay.

In the book: pp. 21–25, The Psychology of Stability and Tension.

05The Most Important Notes

Every note in a melody matters. But some matter more than others, because the ear holds on to them. Before we can analyse a melody, we need to know which notes those are.

The Weight of Each Note

A pop song lasts three or four minutes and usually has only two or three sections that repeat. Some songs consist of little more than a verse and a chorus, each heard several times over, with the same tune and new words. So the number of different melody notes in a song is surprisingly small, and the fewer there are, the more each one counts.

Even so, the brain does not give every note the same attention. Without our noticing, it latches on to some notes and lets others pass. The book calls these anchor notes. They are the backbone of the melody, and the notes in between connect them. When we analyse a melody, these are the notes we look at first.

The Five Kinds of Anchor Note

According to the book, the notes that shape a melody’s feel most strongly are:

• the notes at the chord changes, the most important of all for this book;
• repeated, static notes, because a note sung several times in a row is emphasised by the repetition;
• longer notes, because a held note has time to be heard against the chord;
• starting notes, the first note of a phrase or a section;
• ending notes, the last note of a phrase or a section, where the melody stops, whether it comes to rest there or is left hanging.

Most of these are obvious once you hear them. The first needs some explaining.

The Notes at the Chord Changes

Chords usually change on the first beat of a bar. Sometimes they change every two bars or every four, but the change still tends to come on a first beat. The melody note that belongs to a chord change is usually the note sung on that first beat: the note that arrives with the new chord.

Why do these notes matter so much? Because each chord change feels like a new place the melody has reached, and at that moment the ear is waiting for something particular. How the melody meets each new chord does a great deal to set the feel of the whole melody. Other things matter too, such as how predictable the rhythm is, but this is one of the most important.

Here is a four-bar melody with a new chord in every bar. The ringed notes are the notes at the chord changes. Play it, then press Changes only and play it again.

With only the four ringed notes left, E, D, G and D, you can still hear the shape of the line. The other twelve notes decorate and connect them, but these four carry it. The cards under the roll show what each ringed note is doing against its chord, and the map below plots them. You will learn to read both over the next few chapters.

Notice the other kinds of anchor note in this example too. The melody starts on E and ends on C, its starting and ending notes. And the notes held longest, such as the D at the start of bar four, carry more weight than the quick notes between them.

Anticipated Notes

There is one complication. A note can be anticipated: played half a beat early, an eighth note before the beat it belongs to. (The Rhythm Code, and Rhythm on the Grid, cover anticipation in detail.) A melody note can anticipate a chord change in this way. It starts just before the new chord and is held across the change, and then it belongs to the new chord, not the old one.

Look at the B at the end of bar one. It starts half a beat before the G major chord arrives and is held across the bar line, so it is heard against G, not against C. The same thing happens with the G at the end of bar two, which belongs to the E minor chord that follows. That is why both are ringed, and why each is drawn solid: B belongs to G major, and G belongs to E minor.

So when you look for the note at a chord change, look first at the note that starts with the chord. If nothing starts there, look for a note that started just before and is still sounding.

In the book: pp. 27–30, The Notes That Define the Melody’s Feel.

06Solfège

Most people think every melody note is the same kind of thing, just at a different height. The book argues that this is exactly why their melodies fail to move anyone. Each note of a key has its own feel, and solfège is the way to name it.

Seven Notes, Seven Characters

A song is usually in a key, which means it is built from a set of seven notes, its scale, with one of them as home. In C major the seven notes are C, D, E, F, G, A and B, the white keys of a piano, and C is home.

Solfège gives each of those seven notes a syllable according to its place in the scale: DO, RE, MI, FA, SO, LA and TI. In a major key, DO is always the home note, RE the second note of the scale, MI the third, and so on. The book calls this system by its older name, solmization. (Some countries use SI instead of TI for the seventh note; this guide, like the book, uses TI.)

The important word is “always”. The syllables do not belong to particular pitches. They belong to positions in the key. In C major, DO is C. In G major, DO is G. In any major key, the home note is DO, and the other syllables follow from it. (Minor keys work slightly differently: their home note is LA, as the next chapter explains.)

The book’s central claim about the key is this: each syllable has a distinctive feel, and that feel stays the same whatever the key. DO always sounds like home, like arriving. FA always sounds strained, as if something hurts a little. In other words, the feel of a note comes from its position in the key, not from its pitch.

Hear it for yourself. The player below sets the key with four chords, then plays the syllable you choose on its own. Try a few syllables in one key, then switch key and try the same ones again.

A Little History

The syllables are nearly a thousand years old. In the eleventh century, a monk called Guido of Arezzo used them to help singers learn chants by ear. He took the syllables UT, RE, MI, FA, SOL and LA from the first syllables of the lines of a hymn, Ut queant laxis, so his system had only six notes and no seventh.

In the nineteenth century, an English music teacher, Sarah Anna Glover, turned the syllables into a system of relative pitch, called the Norwich Sol-fa. Instead of standing for fixed pitches, the syllables stood for relationships within the key. John Curwen developed her work into Tonic Sol-fa, and he took the idea further still. In his teaching, every degree of the scale had a character of its own, which he called its “mental effect”: DO was strong, MI calm, FA desolate and TI piercing. More than a century ago, then, Curwen had already noticed what the book builds on: the seven notes of a key each have their own emotional colour.

The author admits that he learned solfège at the age of eight without anyone telling him what it was for, and for years he thought it was useless. It is fairly useless, he says, if you only play music written by others, because then you just follow the notes on the page. He adds that friends of his with degrees in classical music have told him they realised they knew nothing about how music works. Solfège becomes one of the most useful things you can know the moment you try to write a melody, because it tells you how each note will feel.

Transposing

Here is one way to see that the syllables, not the pitches, carry the feel. Suppose a song was written for a tenor and you sing lower. You can move the whole song down into a lower key: every note and every chord moves by the same amount. That is called transposing. Every pitch is now different, and yet the song sounds like the same song. Most listeners could not tell you anything had changed.

Switch between the two keys. Every letter name changes, but every syllable stays where it was: MI, SO, MI, then RE, TI, RE, and so on. The tune is the same because the relationships between its notes are the same. Music, as the book puts it, is about relative relationships, not absolute pitches.

The book makes the same point with the comedy group Axis of Awesome. Their well-known routine strings together dozens of hit songs, all sung over the same four repeating chords in one key. What the routine does not mention is that the original recordings are in many different keys. Every song is still instantly recognisable over the group’s chords, because listeners hear chords by their relationships, not by their pitches.

That is why musicians name chords by Roman numerals when they talk about progressions. I is the chord built on DO, ii the chord built on RE, and so on; capitals mean major chords and small letters minor ones. A progression called I – V – vi – IV is the same progression in any key. Solfège does for melody notes what Roman numerals do for chords.

The Same Pitch in Two Roles

So what does the note C feel like in a melody? There is no single answer, because it depends on the key. In C major, C is DO, and it feels like arrival. In G major, C is FA, and it feels tense and unresolved. Exactly the same note, with two completely different feelings.

Both versions end on the same C, held over the same C major chord. In the first version the song is in C major, so that C is DO, and the phrase has come home. In the second, the first three bars set up G major, so the final C is FA, and the phrase is left leaning forward, waiting for something more. On the map, watch the last dot: as DO it sits at the far left, the stable end; as FA it jumps to the far right.

The book compares a pitch to an actor. Whatever film you cast him in, he is the same man with the same face. But the film decides his part. In one, he is the hero, and everything about him feels safe and settled; that is C as DO. In another, he is the villain, and something about him is unsettling; that is C as FA. The letter name C tells you which actor it is. The syllable tells you which role he is playing, and so how you will feel about him.

The book also likes to describe the syllables as flavours. DO tastes sweet; FA tastes of lemon. A note can taste slightly different in a different key, because of the register and the instrument, but it is still the same flavour.

Unconscious Hearing

None of this requires any theory to feel. Everyone feels the tension of a FA and the sweetness of a DO; that is how melody works on us. The feeling is simply unconscious. Using solfège brings it up to a conscious level and gives it a label, so that you can use it on purpose instead of guessing.

The skill to develop is hearing a melody note and knowing its syllable. You do not need perfect pitch for this: the rare ability to name a note with nothing to compare it with. You need relative pitch: hearing each note by its relationship to the others, and above all to home. Anyone can develop relative pitch with practice, and Training Your Ear gives you a way to start.

Listening List

In the book: pp. 31–36, Relationship With the Key.

07Stable and Unstable Syllables

Each note of the key now has a name and a character. Next, the book puts the seven in order, from the most stable, the one that feels most at rest, to the most unstable, the one that most wants to move.

The Order of Stability

What do “stable” and “unstable” mean? They are a way of describing how a melody note feels. A stable note sounds settled: you could stop on it. An unstable note sounds as if it is on its way somewhere: stop on it and the music feels unfinished. Here is the order the book gives, from the most stable to the least:

DO, the home note, is the most stable. FA is the least stable of all. Play them in this order below and listen to the feeling change as you move along the row. Each syllable is played after the key has been set, so that your ear knows where home is.

Try playing DO and then FA, and then DO and then MI. Even on their own, outside any melody, DO and MI feel like places to rest, while FA feels like a step that needs another step after it.

The Logic of the Order

The book draws two things from this order, and both help you remember it.

First, the three most stable syllables, DO, SO and MI, are the three notes of the home chord. In C major they are C, G and E, which together make the C major chord, the I chord. Those notes sound at rest because the home chord is where the key itself comes to rest.

Second, the first five syllables, DO, SO, MI, LA and RE, make up the pentatonic scale: the five-note scale DO, RE, MI, SO, LA. The pentatonic scale is found in folk music all over the world, in Asia, Africa and Europe, almost like a universal musical language. The book adds that bone flutes about 40,000 years old have been found tuned to it (a claim looked at in Notes on the Book).

That leaves TI and FA at the unstable end, and ordinary music theory, rather than the book, offers a good reason for that too. TI and FA are the two notes of the scale outside the pentatonic, and each sits just a half step from a note of the home chord. A half step is the smallest step there is, from one key of the piano to the very next. B and C are neighbouring white keys with no black key between them, and so are E and F.

So TI sits a half step below DO, and FA a half step above MI. Notes that close to a resting point sound as if they are leaning into it. That is why TI pulls so strongly up to DO, and FA down to MI.

Pentatonic Melodies

Because the pentatonic notes are the most stable, a melody built only from them sounds smooth and easy. The book points out that the melody of Ed Sheeran’s Shape of You uses only those five syllables: there is not a single FA or TI in it. Here is an original melody that does the same, and a second version that adds FA and TI.

The first version flows without friction. The second has more pull to it. The Fs in bars three and four, and the Bs scattered through the line, give it a sense of leaning and wanting. Neither is better; they simply feel different, and now you know why.

The book suggests a habit: when you listen to your favourite songs, try to catch the syllable of the notes that grab your attention, such as the first note of a chorus. Is it DO? SO? RE? You will not always be sure at first, but asking the question is how your ear learns.

Minor Keys

What if a song is in a minor key? The book’s answer is that it makes no difference to the syllables. In a major key the home note, the tonal centre, is DO. In a minor key it is LA. So A minor uses the same seven notes as C major, the white keys, and the same syllables, with A, LA, as the note the melody comes home to. (A song in the Dorian mode can treat RE as home, but that is rare.)

Listen to the last note. The phrase ends on A, LA, over an A minor chord, and it has come home. Notice that the map still draws that LA on the middle line, even though here it is home. That is because the book keeps the same order of stability in a minor key, or even in the rarer modes: each syllable keeps its own character, it says, whatever the key. This is one of the places where the book is easiest to question, and Notes on the Book comes back to it.

Listening List

In the book: pp. 37–40, Relationship With the Key.

08Chord Tones

A melody note has a relationship with the key, which solfège names. It also has a relationship with the chord playing under it. This chapter explains that second relationship, which the book argues is the one most writers get wrong.

Two Contexts at Once

One reason melody has been hard to understand, the book suggests, is that people tend to look at it in isolation. But a melody never exists in a vacuum. Listeners always hear it against two backgrounds at the same moment: the key, which gives each note its syllable, and the chords, which change every bar or so. They take in both without thinking about it. A note can be stable in the key and yet clash with the chord under it, or unstable in the key and yet sit comfortably inside the chord. To understand how a note feels, you need both.

Chords as Triads

For this book, a chord means a triad: three notes stacked a third apart, called the root, the third and the fifth. “A third apart” means every other note of the scale: start on C, skip D, take E, skip F, take G. The root is the note the chord is named after. A C major chord is C, E and G. An F major chord is F, A and C. An A minor chord is A, C and E.

Chords made only from the notes of the key are called diatonic chords. A major key has seven, one on each note of the scale. In C major they are:

• I C major: C, E, G
• ii D minor: D, F, A
• iii E minor: E, G, B
• IV F major: F, A, C
• V G major: G, B, D
• vi A minor: A, C, E
• vii° B diminished: B, D, F

The book leaves out the seventh, B diminished, because modern songs rarely use it. The other six are the chords nearly every song you know is built from.

Chord Tones and Non-Chord Tones

Now the key idea. At any moment, the melody note either belongs to the chord playing underneath or it does not. If it is one of the chord’s three notes, it is a chord tone. If it is any other note of the key, it is a non-chord tone.

So in C major, over a C major chord, the chord tones are C, E and G, and the non-chord tones are D, F, A and B. If the next chord is F major, everything changes: now the chord tones are F, A and C, and the non-chord tones are G, B, D and E. The same E that was a chord tone a moment ago is now a non-chord tone. Chord tones and non-chord tones change every time the chord changes.

Here is the scale played straight up over C major and then again over F major. Remember the rule for reading the roll: solid notes are chord tones, hatched notes are non-chord tones.

Over C, the solid notes are C, E, G and the C at the top. Over F, the solid ones shift to C, F, A and the top C again. Notice that C is a chord tone over both chords, because both C major and F major contain it, while E is solid over C and hatched over F. Listen too: the chord tones melt into the chord, and the non-chord tones rub against it slightly.

One more detail. Because the book counts only the three notes of the triad, a note that would make a richer chord, such as the B over C that turns C major into C major seven, still counts as a non-chord tone here.

The First Beat

Chords usually change on the first beat of a bar. So the note the melody plays on that first beat, as the new chord arrives, does a great deal to decide how the melody feels, and how the whole song feels. These are the notes at the chord changes, the most important kind of anchor note in The Most Important Notes, and this is why they matter.

The reason is expectation. At a chord change, the ear expects the melody to land on a chord tone, because that is what it has heard thousands of times. When the melody does, it feels safe. When it does so at every single change, it feels too safe, and safety soon turns into boredom. The next chapter is about exactly that.

In the book: pp. 41–42 and 50–52, Relationship With the Chords.

09The Sweetness Problem

Nearly everyone who teaches melody says the same thing: follow the chord tones. One of the book’s central claims is that this advice, followed at every chord change, is one of the main things that makes a new song sound old.

Predictable Melodies

After analysing thousands of songs, the author concluded that modern melodies do not always follow the chord tones, and that a melody which follows them all the way through tends to make a song sound generic and dated today.

Be careful what this does and does not say. A chord tone in the melody is not wrong. Technically it is perfect: it obviously sounds good with the chord. So this is not about good and bad notes. It is about predictability. A melody that lands on chord tones at every change does exactly what the listener expects, every time, and that is what makes it feel safe, sweet and, in the end, dull.

Listen to the difference. The chords are the same in both versions. In the first, the note at every chord change belongs to its chord. In the second, three of the four do not.

Both versions are perfectly musical. But the first sounds like something you have heard many times before, and the second has a little more life in it, because at three of the four changes the melody does not land where you expect.

So-Called Mistakes

The book says that people trained in traditional theory often hear modern songs as slightly wrong, because those songs break the rules they learned. They can see that the songs are hugely successful, and to them that feels like a contradiction. The book mentions a retired music professor who wrote that the ideas might well be important, but were better suited to young musicians with open minds than to someone like him, brought up on traditional notation. The book’s answer is that what traditional theory treats as a mistake is, in modern songs, usually deliberate. Even when the songwriter has no theory for it, their instinct is steering them away from notes that would make the song sound dated.

The author admits he used to be one of those people. Having grown up on classical music and jazz, he had a fixed idea of how a song ought to sound, and he disliked modern songs. Once he had analysed hundreds of them and understood how they worked, his hearing switched, much like one of those optical illusions where a spinning figure suddenly seems to turn the other way. He found himself loving a song he had previously disliked.

He compares it to guitar distortion. In the early days of the electric guitar, a distorted tone was a technical fault, and players avoided it. Then some players realised that the broken, fuzzy sound had attitude and emotion, and started pushing their amplifiers on purpose; later, pedals were built to make the same fault on demand. Today a rock record with a perfectly clean guitar sounds wrong. The style grew out of what was once an error.

Sugar

The book’s favourite comparison is sugar. A chord tone in a melody is good in the way that sugar is good. A slice of cake now and then is a pleasure, but you would not add sugar to every meal. A melody built entirely on chord tones, beginning to end, is like a diet of nothing but cake.

It points to the teen pop of the late 1990s, by acts such as Backstreet Boys, Britney Spears and NSYNC, many of whose hits were written and produced by Max Martin. People loved those songs because they were sweet, and one of the main reasons they were sweet was that their melodies kept landing on chord tones. But a diet of nothing but sweetness wears thin. The book imagines being locked in a cake shop for years: by the time you got out, you would never want to see another slice.

That, the book argues, is what happened around 2001, when hip hop, led by artists such as Eminem, took over the charts. Rap verses were built on rhythm and attitude, not sugary melodies; compared with the pop before it, the voice had stopped singing on the chords. After years of cake, listeners were offered something savoury.

Pop itself changed a great deal afterwards, the book adds, even though many people still dismiss it as the same sugary music. Max Martin’s sound briefly fell out of fashion when that first wave of teen pop collapsed. He then wrote hits for artists such as Kelly Clarkson, Katy Perry and Taylor Swift, and one of the things that changed, the book says, is that his melodies began deliberately avoiding chord tones at the changes.

Mozart’s Example

Avoiding the chord tones at a chord change is not a twenty-first-century invention. The book shows Mozart doing it in Eine kleine Nachtmusik, written in 1787. In the main theme, only the opening note belongs to its chord. At every chord change after that, the melody lands outside the chord and then moves onto it.

The book is honest about how big the effect is. It plays the theme again with chord tones on every first beat, and admits that the difference is not huge: both versions sound correct, but the original is more alive. The author adds that he has not analysed much classical music, but this does not sound accidental to him. Earlier composers leaned much more on chord tones at moments like these, which is what made Mozart’s approach new, and Mozart was thought bold in his own day for playing with what listeners expected.

Here is an original phrase built the same way. In the first version, the melody begins on a chord tone, and then every chord change lands a step away from the chord and moves onto it a moment later. In the second version, every change lands straight on a chord tone. Play each a few times. The difference is small, and your ear decides.

Look at the cards under the roll. In the first version, the second, third and fourth changes land on non-chord tones: a C over G, which then falls to B; an F over C, which falls to E; and an E over G, which falls to D. Classical musicians have a name for a note like this, which leans on the beat and then resolves by a step: an appoggiatura. The second version is tidier and plainer. Denying the listener the expected note on the first beat, the book argues, gives a melody more feeling and more interest, and great writers have known this for centuries.

The 90s Syndrome

The author has worked as a producer for many songwriters, and he says their most common problem, by far, was that their songs sounded dated, even though they were brand new. Many of them were very talented. He gave the problem a name: “the 90s syndrome”, a new song that sounds stuck in that decade, and not in a good way. One of its main causes, he found, is in the melody: every melody note that lands on a chord change is a chord tone.

Modern songwriters, the book says, avoid chord tones at the chord changes on purpose. Not always, but often. And this is not only theory: listeners feel it, even if they could never say what it is. The author tested it on his wife, who is not a musician and who loves 1990s songs. He played her two versions of the same song, one written the old way and one the new, and she picked out the dated one straight away.

The book is careful to say that this is not about disliking older songs. It compares them to the Mona Lisa. Nobody thinks the Mona Lisa is a bad painting. But a new painting in exactly that style would look generic today, because it has already been done. In the same way, the old techniques produced great songs, but using them to write new songs gives results that sound like something we have already heard.

Finally, the melody is only one of the things that can date a song. Chord progressions and lyrics can do it too. This book, and this guide, deal mainly with the melody; Changing the Backdrop looks at the chords.

Listening List

In the book: pp. 42–52, Relationship With the Chords.

10Training Your Ear

“How do I actually use this when I write?” The author says it is one of the questions he is asked most often. His answer is that theory only becomes useful once you can feel it, and the way to feel it is to train your ear.

Feeling the Theory

It is one thing to understand an idea, and another to use it while you are writing. To use any piece of theory, you need to know how it feels, so that you can reach for it without stopping to calculate. The book describes this as connecting intuition with logic. Once your ear recognises a sweet note or a tense one, you are no longer just guessing when you write. You know when you are adding tension and when you are adding sweetness, and you can choose.

It would be easier, the book admits, to learn a few formulas and work out the right notes on paper, and some patterns can certainly be borrowed from successful songs. But formulas go stale, as the earlier chapters showed. A trained ear does not: it keeps telling you what genuinely works in a melody, rather than what a rule allows, so it stays ahead of any formula. The author says his own first songs were pure guesswork, and that understanding a few things, such as when to avoid chord tones, made a huge difference.

Two Skills

There are two skills to practise, one for each of the map’s two axes (the next chapter, The Emotional Map, puts them together):

• recognising melody notes as syllables: hearing that a note is MI or RE or TI in the key of the song;
• recognising whether a melody note is a chord tone or a non-chord tone against the chord under it.

You might wonder whether this is something you can learn. The book is confident that it is. If you can recognise a song you know, you can learn to recognise syllables, because both depend on relative pitch: hearing notes by their relationships to each other, not by their exact pitch. Relative pitch is not only about naming intervals and chords. It is also about hearing how a note sits in its key and against its chord. And your brain already does this without your noticing; it is the reason you enjoy music at all. What you are practising is bringing that recognition up to the surface and giving it a name.

Practising the Syllables

This drill plays four chords to set a key, then a single note. Name its syllable. Each question picks a key at random, so you cannot rely on remembering a pitch: you have to hear the note’s relationship to home.

Start with Five notes, the five pentatonic syllables DO, RE, MI, SO and LA. When you can name those reliably, switch to All seven. If you are unsure, press Hear DO and sing from DO up the scale to the note you heard, counting the syllables as you go. That is slow at first, but it trains exactly the right connection, and with practice the counting disappears and you simply know.

Practising Chord Tones

This drill plays one of the six chords of C major, C, D minor, E minor, F, G or A minor, with one note on top. Decide whether the note belongs to the chord.

Listen to whether the top note melts into the chord, as if it were part of it, or rubs against it, as if it were standing slightly apart. That melting or rubbing is exactly what the solid and hatched notes on the rolls are drawing.

A Daily Habit

A few minutes a day is enough. Once the drills feel comfortable, take the skill to real songs: play a song you know, pause it at a chord change, and ask two questions about the melody note you just heard. What is its syllable? Is it in the chord? You will often be unsure at first, and that is fine. Every time you ask, your ear gets a little better.

The book notes that most ear-training apps are built on traditional notation, and that the author has made two apps of his own for these two skills that use no notation at all. They are on his website, which is printed in the book.

In the book: pp. 53–55, How to Train Your Intuition.

11The Emotional Map

A melody note has a place in the key and a relationship with its chord, and both affect how it feels at the same moment. The emotional map is the book’s way of seeing both at once.

Two Axes

For years, the author says, he knew that a melody note’s feel came from its relationship with the key and its relationship with the chord, but he could not see how to put the two together. Then it occurred to him to treat them like the two axes of a graph.

• The horizontal axis is the key. The seven syllables are laid out in their order of stability, from DO on the left, the most stable, to FA on the right, the least stable.
• The vertical axis is the chord. A note that belongs to its chord, a chord tone, goes above the line. A note that does not, a non-chord tone, goes below it.

The two axes cross at LA, in the middle of the row. Everything to the left of that point is on the stable side; everything to the right is on the unstable side. LA itself sits right on the dividing line. The book does not say which side it belongs to. So this guide plots a LA on the middle line rather than in one of the four areas, and the cards under the rolls call it “on the middle line”. Notes on the Book says more.

The rest of the map divides into four areas, which the book numbers from the most settled to the most tense:

1. Stable, top left: a stable syllable that is also a chord tone. This is the sweetest, most settled place a note can be. MI over a C major chord, for example: MI is stable, and E is part of C major.
2. Less stable, bottom left: a stable syllable that is not in the chord. One step less settled. SO over A minor, for example: SO is stable, but G is not part of A minor.
3. Tense, top right: an unstable syllable that is a chord tone. RE over G major, for example: RE is on the unstable side, but D is part of G major.
4. Very tense, bottom right: an unstable syllable that is not in the chord. The most tension a note can carry. FA over C major, for example: FA is the least stable syllable, and F is not part of C major.

The book also puts it more simply. The top-left area feels sweet, and the bottom-right area feels bitter. Notice the order of the middle two areas. In the book’s ranking, a stable syllable outside the chord (area 2) is less tense than an unstable syllable inside it (area 3).

Hearing the Four Areas

Each version of this example leads into one held note at the start of bar two, and only that note is plotted. Listen to each one and see where it lands.

The first, MI over C, simply settles. The second, SO over A minor, is still calm but has a soft ache to it. The third, RE over G, sits comfortably in its chord yet still feels as if the music is in mid-sentence. The fourth, FA over C, clashes with its chord and pulls hard towards resolution.

The opening example of this guide, at the top of the page, was written to land in all four areas: MI over A minor (stable), SO over F (less stable), RE over C (very tense) and RE over G (tense). Scroll back up and play it again with the map in mind.

Notes to Plot

To use the map, you place the melody notes of a song on it as dots. You do not usually need every note. Remember from The Most Important Notes that some notes shape the feel far more than others. Most of the time, the notes at the chord changes are enough, especially for the question of chord tones.

It depends on the song, though. Some sections have no chord changes at all: a whole verse can sit on a single chord. And some melodies repeat one note several times, which gives that note extra weight. In cases like these it is worth plotting every melody note. One example later on, in Anchoring the One, does exactly that; its map is headed “The melody on the map”.

Once the dots are on the map, you can see at a glance the overall balance of a melody: how much of it is sweet, how much bitter, and how much in between. And, as the next chapters show, you can compare songs from different decades and see how that balance has shifted over time.

In the book: pp. 57–61, The Emotional Map.

12The Sweet Decades

Put the melodies of hit songs from different decades on the map, and a pattern appears. This chapter looks at the songs of the 1980s and 1990s, which the book finds clustered in the sweet corner.

Expectation and Surprise

Why should avoiding chord tones make a melody more exciting? The book links it back to rhythm. In rhythm, we expect notes to land on the beats, which is exactly why a part with every note on the beat sounds dull, and why anticipating some notes, placing them just before the beat, creates excitement. Chord tones work the same way. At a chord change we expect a chord tone, so a melody that always delivers one is predictable. A melody that sometimes avoids it surprises us, and a surprise that still makes sense is one of the things we enjoy most in music.

The book goes further. It says that a melody which deliberately avoids chord tones boosts dopamine, the brain’s reward chemical, and it cites a study of prediction and surprise in music to support this. Notes on the Book looks at what that study actually measured.

A Century of Chord Tones

According to the book, popular melodies changed very little in this respect for almost a hundred years, right up to the 2000s. Landing on chord tones at the changes was simply how melodies were written. Then, in the 1990s, pop became more commercial than ever. One production style, much of it Max Martin’s, ruled the charts around the world, and radio and music television everywhere played the same few dozen songs again and again. The result, the book argues, was an overdose of sweet melodies: we were all locked in the cake shop.

The Songs on the Map

The book plots the notes at the chord changes of several hits from these decades. It shows, for example:

• Phil Collins’s Against All Odds (1984): almost every note at a chord change is a chord tone, and there is nothing at all in the very tense area at the bottom right.
• Eric Clapton’s Tears in Heaven (1991): even more typical, with every note at every chord change a chord tone.
• Backstreet Boys’ I Want It That Way (1999): almost every note is a chord tone, and the dots crowd into the sweetest corner, top left. Most of them are DO on a chord tone, the most stable combination there is, and there is not a single FA, the least stable syllable, in the whole song.

Here is an original melody written in that style. Look where its dots land.

Every ringed note is a chord tone, and every one is DO or SO. All four dots sit in the top-left area. It is a pleasant melody, and it would have fitted perfectly on the radio in 1998. That is exactly the problem the book describes.

The book is careful to say that the songs it plots are not bad. Tears in Heaven is a beautiful song. The point is about new songs: writing a new melody that way, all chord tones at the changes, gives a generic and dated result. This is the 90s syndrome again. The listener may not know why, but the song sounds as if they have heard it a thousand times before.

Listening List

Listen for the note the melody lands on each time the chord changes. In these songs it nearly always sounds settled.

In the book: pp. 63–67, How Melody Evolved Over Time.

13The Turn Towards Tension

After the sweet decades, the dots on the map begin to move: down, below the line, and to the right, towards tension. This chapter follows that change from 2001 onwards.

2001

The book treats 2001 as a turning point. Around then, sweet 1990s pop collapsed in popularity and hip hop became one of the biggest genres. The most successful song of 2001 on Billboard’s year-end chart was not a pop song at all but an alternative rock song, Lifehouse’s Hanging by a Moment.

Plot the important notes of its chorus, the ones at the chord changes, and the picture is already very different from the 1990s. The bottom-right corner, the very tense area, holds more of them than any other. A few sit on the stable side as well, so the chorus as a whole is balanced, sweet and bitter together.

Fewer Notes

The book notices a second difference. The melodies of the older songs it plotted used nearly every note of the scale. The backbone of Hanging by a Moment is built from just three syllables.

Some people take that as evidence that older songs were richer, and some studies have claimed that modern hits use fewer different notes and simpler melodies. The book turns this round. In its view, using fewer chords and fewer notes is a sign of sophistication: a modern song does not spell everything out or over-explain its emotion.

It compares this with Miles Davis and the cool jazz of the late 1940s. The bebop players before him packed their solos with notes; Davis deliberately played fewer, and the notes he left out mattered as much as the ones he played. “Less is more”, as the architect Mies van der Rohe put it. The book asks the same question of painting: is a photorealistic painting really better than a minimalist one? Its answer is no; today a photorealistic painting is often thought of as kitsch. In songwriting, as in cool jazz, the focus has moved from showing everything you know to saying more with less.

Here is an original chorus in that spirit. It uses only three syllables, MI, RE and DO, and repeats the same two notes a great deal.

Look at the map. Even with so few notes, the four chord changes land in four different areas: MI over A minor is stable, MI over F is less stable, RE over C is very tense, and RE over G is tense. The melody hardly moves, but the chords move under it, and the balance of sweet and bitter comes from that. Changing the Backdrop returns to this idea.

Too Much Tension

Hanging by a Moment was not the first hit with this much tension. Nirvana’s Smells Like Teen Spirit, from 1991, was full of it, though it reached only number 32 on Billboard’s year-end chart. The author calls its chorus the edgiest he has ever put on the map: every note at every chord change is one of the most unstable syllables.

Perhaps Nirvana were ahead of their time. Or perhaps, the book suggests, they went too far the other way, and too much tension is no better than too much sweetness. More is not always better. We like salt in our food, yet piling on more of it spoils a dish, just as too much sugar does. Here is an original phrase that puts every change in the very tense corner.

Every chord change lands on TI, RE or FA, and none of them is in its chord, so every dot is in the very tense corner. Each one moves onto a chord tone a beat later, which keeps it musical, but the overall effect is restless and raw. According to the book, even the songs of 2025 do not go this far. They lean slightly towards tension but stay balanced overall. Whether choruses like this will become the next trend, nobody knows.

Balance in Pop

As the years went on, the book says, even pop writers who leaned towards sweetness began to move towards a more balanced melody, with more unstable notes and especially more non-chord tones.

It shows this with two Taylor Swift songs. On the map of Love Story, most of the notes at the chord changes are DO on a chord tone, the most stable combination, which is probably why the song feels on the sweet side. But non-chord tones are already appearing, even though the melody still uses every syllable, like a 1990s song. The map of Everything Has Changed, from 2012, is much more balanced: more tension, less sweetness, and fewer different syllables at the changes. The book suggests that part of the reason Taylor Swift’s career has lasted so long is that, consciously or not, her melodies have kept changing in this way.

Listening List

In the book: pp. 67–72, How Melody Evolved Over Time.

14Tension Across a Song

A song is not one melody but several: a verse, perhaps a pre-chorus, a chorus. The book shows that good songs give each section its own balance of sweet and bitter, and that the contrast between them is part of the story the melody tells.

Different Sections, Different Balances

Saying that modern melodies avoid chord tones does not mean they avoid them everywhere. A section made only of chord tones can still work in a modern song without sounding too sweet. One of the main ways to manage this is to give different sections different levels of sweetness and tension.

The book’s usual pattern is a verse that carries more tension and a chorus that is more balanced. It is quick to add that this is a tendency, not a law: some very successful songs do the opposite.

The Sweet Pre-Chorus

The book names one pattern the sweet pre-chorus. The verse is full of unstable notes and tension. Then the pre-chorus, the short section that leads into the chorus, turns sweet, with a chord tone at every chord change. The contrast makes the pre-chorus feel like a release, and keeps the listener engaged.

The book’s examples were both co-written by Ryan Tedder: Ellie Goulding’s Burn and OneRepublic’s Counting Stars, both from 2013. In Burn, a tense verse gives way to a very sweet pre-chorus. In Counting Stars, the verse mixes chord tones and non-chord tones, the pre-chorus lands on chord tones throughout, and the chorus is balanced, with a slight lean towards tension. The book says this is no accident, even if it was never worked out in theory: most likely the writer felt his way to an edgy verse and a sweet pre-chorus to contrast with it. Now you know what created those feelings.

Here are three original sections written to show the pattern. Play each one and compare the maps.

• The verse starts after the first beat, and every chord change it lands on is a non-chord tone on the unstable side: RE, RE and FA. All its dots are in the very tense corner, and it ends on RE.
• The pre-chorus lands on a chord tone at every change: DO, MI, MI and RE. Its dots are all above the line. It sounds sweet and clear after the verse.
• The chorus mixes the two. It opens on SO, a chord tone, then lands on MI and RE outside their chords, and comes home to DO on a chord tone. It ends on DO.

Ending on RE, Ending on DO

The book points out two habits that go with this. First, in most songs the chorus melody ends on DO, the most stable syllable of all, whether or not it is a chord tone at that moment. In a modern chorus, that last note is often the only really stable note. Listen for it: it is one of the easiest syllables to hear.

Second, most verse melodies end on RE. Ending on RE keeps the verse open and unresolved, like the question in Stability and Tension. Then the chorus arrives, usually starting on a stable chord tone, which feels satisfying after the open verse. Finally the chorus settles on DO, the note of conclusion. The book calls this storytelling with melody: open, arrive, conclude.

Reversed Patterns

Patterns like these are tendencies, not laws, and the most successful writers keep breaking them so that their songs sound a little different from the ones before. The book gives several examples.

Morgan Wallen’s 2023 song Cowgirls reverses the usual order. Its verse is entirely sweet, with a chord tone at every chord change. Then the pre-chorus fills with tension and non-chord tones, and so does the chorus, apart from its very first note, which is a chord tone. The book suggests listening for how satisfying that first chorus note feels after all the tension before it: a little sweetness hits hard when you do not overdo it.

Justin Bieber’s DAISIES, from 2025, has a balanced verse, with sweet and bitter notes side by side. Its verse chords are a very familiar progression, I – vi – IV – V. Because the melody often avoids the chord tones, it does not sound generic; with a melody that followed the chord tones, the book says, the same progression would sound dated.

The chorus of DAISIES has no chord changes at all, so the notes that shape it are the first and last notes of each motif, the short musical ideas the chorus is built from. Plotted on the map, they show even more non-chord tones, which gives the chorus a floating feel, more like a pre-chorus than a traditional chorus. And, once again, its last note is DO.

The Exception

Does every modern song have to avoid chord tones and spread its notes across all four areas? No. On the map of Gracie Abrams’s That’s So True, every note at every chord change is a chord tone, exactly the pattern the book blames for the 90s syndrome. Yet the song does not sound dated. The book gives three reasons.

• Exceptions exist. In the book’s words, music has concepts rather than rules, and any one song may be the exception rather than the norm.
• The chords are modern. The melody is only one of the things that can date a song. An old-fashioned melody over an old-fashioned progression is the surest way to sound generic; here the progression follows a very modern idea, and the chords and the lyrics keep the song sounding current.
• The melody is still unusual. It never puts DO on a chord change, not even at the end of the chorus, although every earlier song the book plotted did. And its verse begins with four repeated FAs, the least stable syllable, something almost unheard of in the previous thirty years. Many songs of that period never used FA at all; even Ed Sheeran’s Shape of You, from 2017, has not a single FA or TI.

The book’s conclusion is practical. If your melody uses only chord tones from start to finish, it will be much harder, though not impossible, to avoid sounding generic, whatever the chords. And it is also a question of what kind of song you want. Tate McRae’s greedy (more on it in Anchoring the One) is full of tension; That’s So True sits on the sweeter side. The book notes that their lyrics match: bold confidence in one, softness and honesty in the other.

Listening List

For each song, compare the sections: where does the melody feel tense, and where does it relax?

In the book: pp. 72–76 and 81–90, How Melody Evolved Over Time.

15Anchoring the One

Funk musicians talk about “the one”: the first beat of the bar, the anchor the whole groove returns to. The book finds the same idea in the way modern choruses handle chord tones.

The One in Funk

In funk, “the one” means beat one: the beat that starts each bar and tells everyone where the cycle begins again. James Brown made it something like a personal motto, drilling his bands to hit it together. In a groove built on the one, the first note of the bar acts as an anchor. (This is a narrower use of the word than the anchor notes of The Most Important Notes.) Everything else is free to move around it, on the beat and off it, but when the groove comes round again, it starts on the one.

You hear this most often in bass lines and kick drum patterns, in every style, not only funk. The book points to the bass line of the Red Hot Chili Peppers’ Dark Necessities, and to the typical R&B kick pattern. Here is an original bass line built the same way.

Every bar begins with the root of its chord on beat one, played together with the kick. Between those anchors the line moves freely, on and off the beat. Because the one is always secure, the movement in between sounds playful rather than lost.

The One in a Chorus Melody

The book’s point is that modern choruses treat chord tones the way funk treats the one. The first note of a chorus, at its first chord change, is usually a chord tone. It is not a rule, but it happens far more often than not. Choruses suit this because, as the book observes, roughly nine out of ten start their melody right on the first beat, so their first note arrives together with the first chord, exactly where the one falls in a groove.

After that anchor, the notes at the following chord changes alternate between chord tones and non-chord tones. Then the chorus comes round again, and its first note is a chord tone once more, like the one in a funk groove.

The first change lands on MI, a chord tone of C major: the anchor. The next three alternate: MI over G, outside the chord; DO over A minor, inside it; RE over F, outside it. Then the loop starts again on the anchor. The map shows the result: two dots above the line and two below, a balance of sweet and bitter held together by a secure start.

The book hears this pattern in the choruses of Tate McRae’s greedy and of Speechless, as sung by Naomi Scott. Dua Lipa’s Don’t Start Now is a variation on it, and part of a larger plan. Nearly every note at the chord changes in its verse is a non-chord tone, and its pre-chorus turns sweet and full of chord tones. Its chorus then sets down one chord tone as its anchor on the very first beat; the changes that follow are all non-chord tones rather than alternating.

Static Notes

Tate McRae’s greedy also shows how far the turn towards tension has gone. The book notes that her songs tend to be full of tension and steer clear of sweetness, almost as a rebellion against older songwriting. The verse of greedy sits on a single minor chord, so the book plots every note of the melody rather than only the notes at chord changes. Because the melody repeats some notes many times, those notes carry extra weight, and the one it leans on most is RE, which is outside the chord. An unstable syllable that is also a non-chord tone, repeated again and again, creates a great deal of tension.

The chorus is more balanced, with dots all over the map, and it uses static notes too: the same note sung several times in a row. Repeating a note while the chords change underneath it is a very simple way to play with tension, because the same pitch can move from one side of the line to the other. Here is an original example.

Four Ds in a row. The first three are heard over A minor, which does not contain D, so they are hatched and plotted in the very tense area. The fourth arrives with G major, which does contain D, so it turns solid and moves above the line. The pitch never changes, but the feel does. The book suggests a way to hear this in any song: play the chords and the melody slowly on a piano or guitar, and stop at each chord change to feel how that melody note sits against the new chord.

Listening List

In the book: pp. 77–86, How Melody Evolved Over Time.

16Pillar Notes

Understanding the map is one thing; writing with it is another. This chapter turns the ideas so far into a method you can use the next time you write a melody, built around what the book calls pillar notes.

From Knowing to Choosing

The first step, as Training Your Ear said, is to train your ear until you can tell, as soon as you hear a melody, roughly where it would fall on the map. At that point the map is no longer theory: it is something you can use while you write. When your ear knows how stable a note is, you can start choosing that stability on purpose. You hear a chord progression, and before you try a single note you already have a feeling for the kind of melody it wants, sweeter or more bitter, instead of trying notes at random until something works.

The book argues that what separates very successful songwriters from average ones is often not talent but the ideas they work with. If you follow an outdated or overused idea, you will write generic music however talented you are. It mentions writers who were taught old cadences, the stock chord moves that end a phrase, such as IV – V – I or the jazz ii – V – I. They cannot understand why nobody wants to hear their songs.

The book is just as clear that you cannot work a melody out like a sum. If you try to calculate the notes from theory alone, you will most likely fail. The purpose of theory is to show your intuition what to look for. You will still try things and throw most of them away, and you will still need to practise. Some writers work all this out by instinct, but it can take them ten or fifteen years; the book mentions that Sia has said it took her fifteen years to learn to write hit melodies. Knowing what to look for, it argues, can save you much of that time.

Planning the Feel

With the map in mind, you can plan a song’s feel the same way you plan its structure. Before you write a note, decide what kind of song, or what kind of section, you want. A verse with plenty of tension and a more balanced chorus? Or the opposite? A sweet pre-chorus between them? Deciding this first gives your melody writing a direction.

Setting Pillar Notes

Here is the practical problem. When you write a melody, you will almost certainly drift towards chord tones at the chord changes. Everyone does, especially early on, because chord tones are where the ear expects to land. The book suggests a way to force yourself out of the habit: set pillar notes.

A pillar note is a note you fix in advance for a chord change. Since you would naturally choose a chord tone there, you deliberately choose a non-chord tone instead. Then you write the rest of the melody around the pillars. The book works through an example in C major, with this four-bar progression:

F – F – Am – G   (IV – IV – vi – V)

1. List the non-chord tones for each chord. For F major (F, A, C) they are G, B, D and E. For A minor (A, C, E) they are B, D, F and G. For G major (G, B, D) they are A, C, E and F.
2. Choose one non-chord tone for each chord change. The book’s first suggestion is E over F, D over A minor and E over G. Notice that there are only three chord changes, because the second bar repeats the F chord.
3. Play the chords and sing the pillars on the first beat of each change: E, then D, then E.
4. Fill in the rest. Improvise melody ideas between the pillars, keeping only the pillars fixed. Arrive on E as the F chord comes in, move freely through the two bars of F, and make sure you land on D the moment the chord changes to A minor, and on E when it changes to G.

You now have a backbone that will not sound generic, because the notes the ear listens to most are deliberately off the chord. Try it with the planner below. The buttons for each chord show its candidate notes: hatched ones are non-chord tones for that chord, solid ones are chord tones. Pick one note per change, then play the result.

Mixed Pillars

This is not a formula, and it does not guarantee a good melody. Its job is to stop you landing on chord tones where you would otherwise land on them without thinking. Write several melodies on the same pillars, and try different non-chord tones as pillars too.

Nor does every pillar have to be a non-chord tone. The book suggests mixing them, for example by alternating. The planner’s presets include its two other suggestions:

• E over F, E over A minor and E over G. The middle pillar is a chord tone, because A minor contains E.
• E over F, D over A minor and D over G. The last pillar is a chord tone, because G major contains D.

The last preset puts a chord tone on every change, for comparison: listen to how much plainer it sounds. And the pillars do not have to sit close together, as they do here. They can be far apart, so the options are endless.

Finally, the melody does not have to begin on the first beat, and the book points out that verse melodies usually do not. They often start just before the first beat, or somewhere after it. The pillars stay fixed to the chord changes. A phrase that starts just before the first beat arrives on its first pillar as the F chord comes in. A phrase that starts after the first beat has no note at that first change, like the verse in Tension Across a Song, and then the D and E pillars carry the plan.

Here is a finished verse built on the first set of pillars, E, D and E. Everything apart from the pillars was written afterwards, to join them up.

All three ringed notes are non-chord tones, two of them MI and one RE, so the map shows them below the line: two in the less stable area and one in the very tense one. The melody between them is simple, but the verse already sounds more interesting than a melody that lands on the chords.

In the book: pp. 91–97, Using the Emotional Map in Songwriting.

17Four Ways to Meet a Chord

So far a note at a chord change has been either a chord tone or not. The book adds a practical detail: what the melody does in the moment after it arrives. That turns two choices into four.

Four Moves

When the melody reaches a new chord, it can behave in four different ways:

1. On the chord, and it stays. The melody arrives on a chord tone and the motif ends there. The tune may carry on after a short rest, but not straight away.
2. Off the chord, and it stays. The melody arrives on a non-chord tone and holds it.
3. Off the chord, then onto it. The melody arrives on a non-chord tone and moves straight to a chord tone.
4. On the chord, then off it. The melody arrives on a chord tone and moves straight to a non-chord tone.

Each version of this example arrives at the same C major chord in one of the four ways. Only the note at the change is plotted.

The first, landing on E and staying, is the simplest: it is settled, and there is nothing more to explain. Moves 2 and 3 are less clear-cut, because the note at the change is a non-chord tone, and some syllables clash much more than others when they are outside their chord; that decides which of the two moves suits them. Move 4 comes at the end of the chapter.

An Experiment

The book asks you to try something before reading its conclusions, so that you experience it with your own ears first. Take a guitar or a keyboard, choose a key, and play its chords one at a time: I, ii, iii, IV, V and vi. In C major, that is C, D minor, E minor, F, G and A minor. While you play them, sing the same syllable over every chord: DO, which is C, over all six. Notice how each chord sounds with that note, especially the chords that do not contain it. Then do the same with RE, then MI, FA, SO, LA and TI.

The example below does the playing for you. Choose a syllable, and it is held over the six chords in turn. Sing along with it if you can. The map counts how often the syllable belongs to the chord and how often it does not.

Try each syllable before you read on.

The Experiment’s Results

You will probably find that some syllables sound good over almost every chord, some do not, and a couple sound uncomfortable over nearly everything they are not part of. The book’s findings:

• MI and RE work best. MI in particular sounds good with every diatonic chord. So when MI or RE is a non-chord tone, you can usually use move 2: land on it and stay.
• DO, SO and LA also work as non-chord tones in many cases. Together with MI and RE, that is the pentatonic scale again.
• TI and FA do not sound good with any chord unless they are in it. FA is the worst of all as a non-chord tone.

Notice that this is not simply the order of stability. You might expect the most stable syllables to clash least, and that is partly true, but RE, on the unstable side, sits more comfortably over other chords than DO does. What matters is how each particular note sounds against each particular chord, because, as the book reminds us, however independent a modern melody may seem, we always hear it together with the chord.

So what do you do with TI and FA? That is where move 3 comes in: land on the non-chord tone at the change, then move straight to a chord tone. You can do this with any syllable, but with FA you hardly have a choice, because it clashes so much when it is held. This is the appoggiatura from The Sweetness Problem: a note that leans on the beat and then resolves by a step. The book’s short version of all this: if a note at a chord change does not sound good, most likely because it is a TI or a FA, resolve it to the nearest chord tone.

As always, the book does not want this taken as a rule. Use your ears. If it sounds good, it is good.

Resolving a Clash

The book gives several examples of move 3. In Ed Sheeran’s Eyes Closed, from 2023, the stressed syllable at the start of the chorus lands on FA over the home chord, where it does not belong, and the very next note steps down to MI, which does. In Charlie Puth’s Attention, the stressed syllable of the title lands on TI over A minor and resolves at once onto A.

And then there is Nirvana’s Smells Like Teen Spirit, the edgiest chorus on the book’s map. Every note at a chord change in its chorus is a non-chord tone, many of them TI and FA, but every one of them resolves straight away to a chord tone. With the most clashing notes, holding them and resolving them at once sound very different.

Stepping Off the Chord

Move 4 is the reverse, and the book finds it particularly interesting. Here the melody arrives on a chord tone just as the chord changes, exactly where the ear expects it, so the moment feels safe and familiar. Then it steps onto a non-chord tone, and the line becomes edgier and more individual.

It is the opposite of move 3. There, the melody fixes a clash by correcting it straight away. Here, it says clearly “we have arrived”, and then adds a small twist at the end. The book likens it to a sentence that ends at the chord change, followed by a short, sharper remark in brackets. It starts safe, but it does not become too sweet, because the line ends on a more interesting spot.

The book hears this in many of Sting’s songs, including Englishman in New York, where the stressed word at a chord change is a chord tone and the words after it step off onto non-chord tones. It also points to Zoe Wees’s Control, from 2020, where a chord tone at the change is followed straight away by a non-chord tone.

So at a chord change the melody is not simply on the chord or off it. Some notes sound good with almost any chord, and others clash so much that they usually resolve at once. When these four moves become familiar to your ear in other people’s songs, you will find yourself reaching for them in your own.

Listening List

Listen for the note on the stressed syllable at each chord change, and for what the melody does straight afterwards.

In the book: pp. 99–108, How Melody Behaves at Chord Changes.

18Changing the Backdrop

A melody note’s feel depends on the chord under it. So you can change how a melody feels without changing a single note of it, by changing the chords. The book calls the chord progression the backdrop.

Dated Progressions

A dated melody is not the only way to end up with a generic song. The chords can do it on their own: a tired, overused progression can make a fresh-sounding song very hard to write. So if something still feels wrong after you have put non-chord tones into your melody, the problem may not lie only in the melody. It is not impossible to write something fresh over a worn-out progression, the book says, but it is much harder, so it is better to start from chords that already sound modern.

The author says that many of the songwriters he has worked with used dated chord progressions. Sometimes, when they picked up a guitar to play him a song, he wanted to stop them before they reached the first word: the chords alone already said “I’ve heard this before”.

Once they learned some more modern ideas about progressions, they came back with new songs that made a huge difference. Not because they had suddenly become better writers, he stresses, but because the ideas they were using were no longer out of date. He made the same mistake with his own first songs, when people told him they sounded like something they had heard before. That, he says, is the textbook description of generic.

One Melody, Two Progressions

Sometimes the chords are all that needs to change. The book points you to two recordings of the same song, with exactly the same melody and different chords. In the first, the chords follow the melody, so the melody keeps landing on chord tones, and it sounds generic. In the second, the original, the chords were chosen so that the melody does not simply outline them.

Here is an original melody treated the same way.

The melody does not change at all. Over the first progression, C, G, A minor and G, every ringed note is a chord tone, and every dot sits above the line. Over the second, F, C, D minor and E minor, three of the four ringed notes fall outside their chords: E over F, D over C and C over D minor. Only the B over E minor is still a chord tone. The tune now sounds less settled and less predictable, purely because of what is underneath it.

Repeated Lines

The same trick works within a song. The book calls it a kind of cheat code. Say you have one line of a verse melody, and you simply repeat it as the second line. If everything stays the same, the repetition feels lazy, dull or even annoying. But if the chord under the second line is different, the context changes, and you get away with it.

Bars three and four repeat bars one and two exactly. The first time, the line starts on E over a C major chord, where E belongs. The second time, it starts on the same E over F major, where it does not. On the map, the dot keeps its place on the horizontal axis, because the syllable is still MI, but it drops from above the line to below it, from the stable area to the less stable one. The pitch has not changed; its emotional job has.

The book’s example is the verse of Charlie Puth’s Attention, where the second line repeats the first almost exactly, starting on the same note, but over a different chord, so that a chord tone becomes a non-chord tone. Modern songs, the book says, do this all the time. It also creates the impression that the melody is independent of the chords, which is another break with traditional theory. But it is only an impression: we always hear the melody against its chords.

One Note, Many Chords

Take the idea to its limit and the melody hardly moves at all. In the refrain of Billie Eilish’s Birds of a Feather, the book points out, the melody is almost entirely a single repeated note. That note belongs to the first two chords and not to the other two. It is no surprise that the note is MI: as Four Ways to Meet a Chord showed, MI sounds good with every chord in the key.

The chorus of Taylor Swift’s Out of the Woods, from 2014, does something similar. Its melody keeps returning to DO while the chords change under it, so the same note alternates between being a chord tone and a non-chord tone. (On the first beat of each chord, the book notes, she still lands on chord tones, but the note that stands out is DO.)

In the first version, the melody is nothing but E, over C, A minor, D minor and G: inside the chord, inside, outside, outside. In the second, it is nothing but C, over C, E minor, F and G: inside, outside, inside, outside. The melody stands still while the backdrop moves, and the map shows the same syllable crossing back and forth over the line.

Simple Melodies

Taylor Swift has been criticised for melodies that are too plain, without big leaps. The book calls this a misunderstanding of how modern melodies work, and compares it again with cool jazz, whose players were criticised by bebop musicians for playing too few notes. A simple, static melody can make it sound as though the melody has broken free of the chords, and that makes it less generic and more modern: more with less.

The author tells of a video he made about why the melody of Birds of a Feather is so catchy, which drew dozens of comments saying it was not catchy at all. His answer is that the commenters were projecting their own taste onto a song that had been streamed billions of times. What they probably think of as catchy, a melody with big leaps and lots of movement, was catchy fifteen to thirty years ago. Today, he argues, what counts is mood, attitude and story, rather than a melody that races across the whole scale.

Listening List

In the book: pp. 109–115, Changing the Backdrop.

19The Future of Melody

The book ends by looking forward. If listeners’ tastes in melody have changed before, they will change again. What does that mean for someone writing songs now?

A Language for Melody

For more than a century, the book says, most songwriters wrote melodies without any clear framework for the emotional mechanics behind them. They relied on instinct, on trends, on imitation and on trial and error. Even very successful writers were in this position: they could sense what worked and polish it, but they seldom had words for why it worked.

The emotional map offers those words. Instead of vague impressions, you have consistent categories for what a melody is doing emotionally: this note is sweet, that one bitter, this section sits mostly above the line. Once you can name it, you can track it, teach it and, above all, design it on purpose rather than only feel it.

Changing Tastes

According to the book, today’s listeners prefer melodies that balance tension and stability, moving through all four areas of the map instead of repeating the sweet, safe patterns of the past. That preference keeps shifting, too. Familiar patterns slowly lose their effect: what excited us the first hundred times starts to sound predictable. New music pushes a little further each time, and gradually our sense of what sounds normal moves with it. Melodies that behave the same way for too long start to feel dull, even when nothing about them is technically wrong.

You have already heard this happen in this guide. The sweet, chord-tone melody in The Sweet Decades would have sounded fresh in the 1990s and sounds generic now, and the book expects today’s fresh melodies to go the same way. So the map is a picture of how taste has moved so far, not of what will work for ever. The book hopes its readers will think of melody as an organised landscape, in which each note has a job and a feeling of its own. That is a different thing from a list of scales, a set of tips, or the old advice to follow the chords.

The Illusion of Timelessness

Why is melody writing still taught as if it never changed? The author says he has not found a single book or course that discusses these shifts, and he suggests two reasons why they are easy to miss.

First, the differences are subtle on the surface. On paper, a hit from today looks much like one from 1995: the same chords from the key, mostly simple triads, the same notes. But small differences on paper make a large difference to the listener.

Second, many current hits deliberately borrow the sound of earlier decades, as The Lasting Power of Melody described, so the production can feel nostalgic. That resemblance is mostly cosmetic. It sits in the sound itself, the instruments and the production, and that surface is far easier to copy than the writing underneath. The writing, meaning the melody, the way the chords move, the rhythm of the phrases and the shape of the lyrics, is still modern. Songs can be timeless, the book says, and so can sounds, but songwriting tools are not.

Future Shifts

Nobody knows exactly how melody will change. It will not change completely, and it will still feel familiar, but there will be small shifts that matter to how listeners feel. Each new generation of writers moves the line a little, usually so subtly that listeners feel the change without knowing what it is. Taste changes first, the book observes, and theory catches up later.

What the map gives you is a way to measure melody in a dimension that was invisible before, and so a way to notice those shifts as they happen. None of this is abstract. You can hear it in real songs, and once you are listening for it, you notice how a single note can change the feel of a whole section. That awareness, the book concludes, is the whole point: to understand what is really happening in melodies, and to bring that understanding to your own writing.

In the book: pp. 117–120, The Future of Melody.

20Notes on the Book

The book is short, practical and well worth reading alongside this guide. A few of its points deserve a second look, either because it overstates something or because this guide handles it differently.

• Earlier work. The book presents its ideas as new, though it credits John Curwen with noticing that each degree of the scale has its own character. Others have explored this ground too. The music psychologist David Huron, in Sweet Anticipation (2006), studied how listeners describe the feel of each scale degree and how expectation shapes musical pleasure. Classical theory has long had names for notes that sit outside the chord on a strong beat: the appoggiatura, and the suspension, a note held over from one chord into the next, where it clashes until it moves. Jazz teaching talks about tensions and “avoid notes” over each chord. The book’s real contribution is putting the key and the chord on one simple picture that a songwriter can use.
• The research it cites. The study the book refers to, by Cheung and colleagues (2019), appeared in Current Biology, not Nature Communications as the book’s footnote says. It played listeners chord progressions taken from Billboard hits, with the melody removed. It measured how much they enjoyed each chord, and their brain activity in an MRI scanner. It supports the general idea that surprise and uncertainty shape how much we enjoy music. It did not measure dopamine, and it says nothing directly about non-chord tones in melodies.
• Popular and better. The book often treats what most people prefer, measured by charts and streams, as an objective fact about what works. Popularity is a fact; whether it makes a melody better is a judgment. The book’s advice is most useful if your aim is to write songs that sound current to a mainstream audience, which is the aim it sets itself.
• The decades. The book’s history of melody is illustrated with only a handful of songs. The author says he has analysed thousands, but the book does not show that data, so its history cannot be checked. Notes outside the chord on strong beats were common long before 2000, as its own Mozart example shows, and they are everywhere in jazz standards and in much of the pop of the 1960s and 1970s. Read the history as a tendency in mainstream pop, not a law.
• LA in the middle. The book draws the vertical axis of the map through LA, without saying whether LA counts as stable or unstable. This guide marks notes on LA as being on the middle line, rather than putting them in one of the four areas.
• Minor keys. The book keeps the same order of stability in a minor key, with LA as home. But a home note, by definition, sounds settled, so in a minor key LA behaves much as DO does in a major key. The order is clearest in major keys, and this guide’s examples are mostly in major for that reason.
• Triads only. The book counts only the three notes of a triad as chord tones. In styles built on richer chords, such as R&B, jazz and neo-soul, a seventh on top of a chord is usually heard as part of it. If your song uses seventh chords, decide for yourself whether to count the seventh as a chord tone.
• Ancient flutes. The book says that flutes about 40,000 years old were tuned to the pentatonic scale. The oldest known flutes, from caves in southern Germany, are made of bird bone and mammoth ivory, but how they were tuned is not known.
• “Less is more”. The book credits the phrase to the architect Mies van der Rohe, who made it famous. It appears earlier, in Robert Browning’s poem Andrea del Sarto (1855).
• Small details. The book calls Morgan Wallen’s song Cowgirl; its title is Cowgirls. And it dates Zoe Wees’s Control to 2023, but the song was released in 2020; it later appeared on her 2023 album.

The author is a songwriter and producer who trained in classical music and jazz before turning to the analysis of modern songs. He has also written The Rhythm Code, which covers the third dimension of melody, its rhythm, and which has a companion of its own: Rhythm on the Grid. His website, printed in the book, offers ear-training apps for the two skills described in Training Your Ear, and courses on modern chord progressions.

ABook Index and Glossary

Book Index

Glossary

90s syndrome

The book’s name for a new song that sounds dated, often because every melody note at a chord change is a chord tone.

Anchor note

A note the ear holds on to: a note at a chord change, a repeated note, a long note, or a starting or ending note. In funk, “the one” is also called an anchor, in a narrower sense.

Anticipation

A note played just before the beat it belongs to. A melody note can anticipate a chord change and belong to the new chord.

Appoggiatura

A non-chord tone on a strong beat that then moves by step to a chord tone.

Areas of the map

1 stable (a stable syllable that is a chord tone), 2 less stable (a stable syllable that is not), 3 tense (an unstable syllable that is a chord tone), 4 very tense (an unstable syllable that is not). LA sits on the line between them.

Backdrop

The book’s word for the chord progression under a melody.

Bitter

The book’s word for the tense notes at the bottom right of the map.

Cadence

A stock chord move that ends a phrase, such as V – I or IV – V – I.

Chord

Here, a triad: three notes stacked a third apart, called the root, the third and the fifth.

Chord tone

A melody note that is one of the three notes of the chord under it. Drawn solid in this guide.

Diatonic

Made from the notes of the key. A major key has seven diatonic chords, I, ii, iii, IV, V, vi and vii°; the book leaves out vii°, which modern songs rarely use.

DO

The home note of a major key, and the most stable syllable.

Emotional map

The book’s chart of melody notes: syllables from stable to unstable across, chord tones above the line and non-chord tones below.

FA

The fourth note of the scale, and the least stable syllable.

Half step

The smallest step between two notes: from one key of a piano to the very next, such as E to F or B to C.

Key

The set of seven notes a song is built from, with one of them as home.

LA

The sixth note of the scale; the middle of the map, and home in a minor key.

Motif

A short musical idea, a few notes long.

Non-chord tone

A melody note that is not in the chord under it. Drawn hatched in this guide.

Pentatonic scale

A five-note scale: DO, RE, MI, SO and LA, the major scale without FA and TI. Found in folk music all over the world.

Perfect pitch

The rare ability to name a note with nothing to compare it with. Not needed for anything in this guide.

Piano roll

The grid in a DAW where melody notes are drawn, with time running left to right and pitch from bottom to top.

Pillar note

A melody note chosen in advance for a chord change, usually a non-chord tone, around which the rest of the melody is written.

Pre-chorus

A short section that leads from the verse into the chorus.

Relative pitch

Hearing notes by their relationships to each other and to the key, rather than by their exact pitch.

Roman numeral

A way of naming a chord by its place in the key: I for the chord on DO, ii for the chord on RE, and so on. Capitals mean major, small letters minor.

Solfège

Naming the notes of a key by syllables, DO, RE, MI, FA, SO, LA and TI, according to their position. The book calls it solmization.

Stable, unstable

How settled a note sounds. A stable note feels like a place to rest; an unstable one feels as if it needs to move on.

Static note

A note repeated several times in a row, which gives it extra weight.

Suspension

A note held over from one chord into the next, where it clashes until it moves.

Sweet

The book’s word for the settled notes at the top left of the map.

Syllable

A note’s solfège name, such as DO or MI, which says where it sits in the key.

The one

The first beat of the bar, used as an anchor in funk; by extension, a chorus melody that anchors its first note on a chord tone.

TI

The seventh note of the scale, which leans strongly up to DO.

Tonal centre

The home note of a key: DO in a major key, LA in a minor key.

Transposing

Moving a whole song into a different key. The pitches change; the syllables do not.

Triad

A three-note chord: root, third and fifth.

Melody on the Map is an independent study companion to The Emotional Map of Melody by Tamas Bodzsar (2026). Every example is original, and the songs named are for listening.