[Music] whatever type of music you're into it may surprise you to learn that things that sound very different from each other on the surface are in fact using the same basic musical tools and techniques looking at the mechanics of a beautiful tune a sweet cord or a hot driving Rhythm is a gratifyingly Democratic process when you analyze the nuts and bolts of music you find that the apparent differences between musical cultures between eastern and western between folk and jazz or between classical and pop start to melt away the underlying techniques and tricks of good music can be and are applied to virtually any and every [Music] style in this series I'm going to look under music's Bonnet and find out what makes it tick how music works we'll be looking at Rhythm Harmony and Bas but we'll start with music's Soul Melody [Music] [Music] [Applause] [Music] [Applause] Melody is music's most powerful tool when it comes to touching our emotions our mothers sing Lis to us when we're infants and tests have shown that we can even as babies recognize Tunes we heard in the womb Tunes can act as a bridge between cultures when language fails us people can feel totally wrapped up in operas and musicals whose texts they don't understand or don't remember because the Melodies somehow convey the story and the feelings on their own Tunes can Inspire patriotism hope and Redemption and they lie at the heart of most of the world's faiths they can express love loss and longing I my make make [Music] which dress I'm going to wear now now little oh yes what is it then about a good Melody that makes it so effective at first hearing all the world's many musical systems from Africa to Indonesia from the Andes to the urals did do indeed sound very different from each other but actually some melodic principles are Universal and hold true for every culture on Earth listen to these five songs from around the world they all share something simple and profound Al Al Al aluah Al Al aluah [Music] [Music] my home is over Jordan [Music] I am sailing I am saing home again cross the sea these songs are all based on on five notes what's more they all use the same five notes that's right every music system in the world shares these five notes in common indeed they're so fundamental to every note composed or performed anywhere on the planet that it seems like our Instinct for language that they were pre-installed in us when we were born these five notes are a human genetic inheritance like the fingers on our hands [Music] in the west we call Tunes made from these five notes pentatonic after the ancient Greek word for five pentas these are [Music] they it's easy to find the pentatonic notes on a piano keyboard because they're the black notes [Music] an enormous number of popular Tunes throughout history have been based on a pentatonic shape especially the singalong anthems from old [Music] langine to Swing Low Sweet [Music] Chariot and Mal of Kint [Music] a lot of anthemic rock songs oscillate around pentatonic patterns too the famous riff from lead Zeppelin's whole lot of love is quintessential pentatonica [Music] but basing your Melody on the pentatonic pattern didn't mean you were stuck with just those five notes all musical cultur developed more notes as time went on but it's important to emphasize that having lots of notes didn't make your tune necessarily better it just made it different the key thing is not how many notes you have but what you do with them so our next task is to dismantle the elements of a tune one by one and work out what they're up [Music] to how does Melody work let's get some definitions out of the way first there are three main ingredients s to every Melody the notes you choose how high or low they are and the pattern they make one after another so let's start with the notes you pick in the first place in theory the choice is infinite how many notes you have depends on how small you want the distance between the notes to be if you arrange your notes too closely together you might have a problem distinguishing between them my synthesizer can tell me that these two notes this one and this one are measurably quite different notes but only a very finely tuned human ear could pick that up to most people it sounds like the same note it's no surprise then that all known musical systems have chosen notes that are recognizably different here's the Western one think of the notes as rungs on a ladder [Music] this in short is how all musical scales or ladders work you decide how close together you want your rungs to be and you make each rung a note now some musical systems have 24 rungs in their ladder in western music we have 12 in Chinese and Indian music there are many more rungs on the ladder and so the notes are much closer together so we've got our basic notes then but now we have to decide how high or low these notes are the measuring of how high or low a musical note is is called pitch now if I blow down this Organ Pipe I will produce a note the note is called a but if I blow down this other Organ Pipe exactly half the size it'll also produce a note called a this a is obviously much higher same note not different pitch the pitch of a musical note tells you how high or low it actually is on our Western musical lad every 12th rung is another a the next element in Melody is the distance between notes between your a and your C and your e and your G for example these distances are called intervals and they've got nothing to do with queuing at the L's L when you go to the theater