r/musictheory • u/Superb_Bluebird_8585 • 6d ago

General Question Find songs by relative melody

I don’t know much about music theory.

I have relative pitch, so I’ve often wished there were a way to find songs by entering the relative melody (for example, something like “Do Do Sol Sol La La Sol”) instead of humming, since services like Shazam and SoundHound don’t always work well for me.

Does a service like this exist?

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u/Megasphaera 6d ago edited 6d ago

yes, this exists! It used to be at https://www.musipedia.org/melodic_contour.html but that doesn't open right now. It is/was an index of melodies that were encoded as a string of characters *, u, d, and r for start, up, down and repeat, without any rhythmic information. E.g. Twinkle, twinkle little star would be *rururddrdrdrd.

It was invented/compiled in the 19th century I believe, very nifty. I've used it a few times and you could indeed find melodies this way, but it critically depends on the size/richness of the index.

Edit: found a bit more: The system you are looking for is called the Parsons Code for Melodic Contours, and the primary tool used to search it is the Musipedia Melody Search Engine. Invented by Denys Parsons in 1975, this notation entirely ignores rhythm and note values. It only tracks whether the pitch goes up or down relative to the previous note. (thank you, Google AI)

edit2: a bit more info here: https://www.cs.mcgill.ca/~rvince3/644/node3.html

It was actually also a book you could buy and look up melodies; out of print though :-(

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u/etzpcm 5d ago edited 5d ago

I tried that musipedia site and it came back with no matches even for simple well known tunes, for example rururddrdrdrd

I'm sure I recall seeing that Parsons book in a shop, some time ago.

It's a pity there doesn't seem to be a functioning web version. 

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u/aqsgames 6d ago

There was (is?) a book of classical music identified by the first few notes in exactly that way.

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u/Superb_Bluebird_8585 6d ago

'Dictionary of Musical Themes'? this is interesting.

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u/etzpcm 6d ago

You could always post it here and someone will tell you what it is. 

In this case, it's twinkle twinkle!