ABSTRACT
Melody seems to be the second most ubiquitous and defining element among the music of the world. Music must include rhythmic durations, and most music also feature melody at various levels of elaborateness. The relationship between pure ratios and actual pitch production and discrimination in musical contexts is a complex one. One is in the end left to come to terms with the fact that, because the human voice and the majority of musical instruments are capable of very fine gradations of pitch, musical intonation is in actual practice in flux from moment to moment. Four recorded performances of music from rather different contexts are examined, namely, vocal examples in West African pentatonicism, African-American blues, Arabic maqmt, and Indian rga. Blues melody can also be most simply understood tonally as arising from an extension of world pentatonic mode two, along the lines observed in the previous Temne song.
