culture.^14 Violations of these schemata are quite salient (sound example 2). In fact, insensi-
tivity to such violations is diagnostic of true ‘tune deafness’(congenital amusia).^16Contour
The overall pattern of ups and downs created by a sequence of pitch intervals, regardless of
precise interval size, defines a pitch contour. A pitch contour and its temporal pattern
together define a melodic contour,^15 a perceptually salient aspect of melodies, which plays
an important role in memory for unfamiliar melodies.^17 Sensitivity to melodic contour
emerges early in infancy^18 and is likely to be related to the importance of intonation in
speech perception.^19Parallelism
Parallelism refers to motivic/thematic similarity between different parts of a melody.
For example, the first and last phrase of K0016 are identical, which helps to provide this
melody with a sense of closure. Parallelism need not be so literal: for example, it can be based
on similar melodic contours. The study of parallelism is based on the measurement of struc-
tural and perceptual similarity. Since similarity is a matter of degree, and is influenced by
many factors, the study of parallelism has lagged behind other aspects of music which have
more discrete and easily measurable characteristics (e.g. grouping, metre, and interval/tonal328 Figure 21.3 Metrical structure of K0016, indicated as a hierarchy of beats above (A) Western music notation.
(B) Piano roll notation. To help orient the reader, phrase boundaries are marked below the pitch sequence in (B),
and phrases are labelled as p1, p2, etc. (cf. Figure 21.2).
A0 2 4 6 8 10
Time (s)Semitones re C 4p1 p2 p3 p4 p5(2x)(1x)(1/2x)(1/4x)
B(2x)(1x)(1/2x)(1/4x)- 5
05