What's the difference between counterpoint and melody?

Counterpoint


Definition:

  • (n.) An opposite point
  • (n.) The setting of note against note in harmony; the adding of one or more parts to a given canto fermo or melody
  • (n.) The art of polyphony, or composite melody, i. e., melody not single, but moving attended by one or more related melodies.
  • (n.) Music in parts; part writing; harmony; polyphonic music. See Polyphony.
  • (n.) A coverlet; a cover for a bed, often stitched or broken into squares; a counterpane. See 1st Counterpane.

Example Sentences:

  • (1) The corporation said it counterpointed the KKK spokesman's comments with a US academic critical of the organisation.
  • (2) Nokia's share was lower than HTC's, according to Counterpoint, suggesting that it sold fewer than 400,000 phones in the US during September.
  • (3) This angelic whirling is a perfect counterpoint to the earthly chanting.
  • (4) The harmonious counterpoint of this septet of currents explains most of the electrical excitability properties of these cells.
  • (5) Not only did this life-affirming piece of mischief make the perfect counterpoint to the self-harming entrepreneurial initiative of the emaciated illusionist, it also enabled a TV audience of millions to get a taste of music they might not otherwise have heard, as Jus' a Rascal was beamed around the world as the unofficial soundtrack to the much sought after news footage of the end of Blaine's 44-day fast.
  • (6) "The counterpoint to the ongoing wars of aggression and the drumbeat heralding a 'clash of civilisations' is the desire of ordinary people in the west and in the Arab world to engage with each other," the Egyptian author Ahdaf Soueif said at the time.
  • (7) Ilves was dressed in his trademark tweeds and bow tie, a counterpoint to his mission to make Estonia the most digitally progressive country in Europe .
  • (8) Paul Ryan’s policies are so vague that he must bolster them by nightmarish counterpoint.
  • (9) He adds that they sometimes get letters from children enamoured with his "hard-right stance", so they introduced a democratic movement as a counterpoint.
  • (10) I was doing an interview for one of those pop keyboard magazines, and the guy said to me ‘What do you think of The Orb?’ And I said ‘What’s The Orb?’ And he said ‘You don’t know?’ And I said ‘No I don’t know,’ and he said ‘You should know,’ and he handed me the CD and I took it home there was Electric Counterpoint.
  • (11) That’s a skill.” Jakielka said Hodgson’s approach was a refreshing counterpoint to the authoritarian Capello but conceded England would have to deliver in France to keep him in his job.
  • (12) Rubio himself referred to two such examples – China and Vietnam – in a Wednesday op-ed in the New York Times , but to make a counterpoint: that despite the opening up of economic pathways, both China and Vietnam remain notorious violators of basic human rights.
  • (13) In his vast orchestral canvas St Thomas Wake (1968) his target is the foxtrot, which appears grotesquely parodied alongside plainchant and counterpoint, ordered with the help of “magic squares” (assemblages of numbers whose rows and columns and long diagonals yield the same total).
  • (14) For Rubin, the Benghazi attack offers the perfect counterpoint to Chris Christie’s Bridgegate ; an opening born of human tragedy.
  • (15) Without getting the counterpoint, I was drawn more and more to the conservative side.
  • (16) For the quarter, Counterpoint's data suggests that Nokia sold fewer than 1.5m phones in the US.
  • (17) The marriage between the parents is just one union serving as a counterpoint to the love match that all the daughters so ardently, subversively desire.
  • (18) Curriculum vitae Age 59 Education Dartmouth College, New Hampshire (history); University College, Oxford (PPE) Career 1970 writer, Rolling Stone magazine 1973 presenter, Radio 1 1974 presenter, Radio 4 arts show Kaleidoscope 1983 founder member, TV-am 1992 launch team, Classic FM 1995 Radio 3 1996 Radio Academy's Outstanding Contribution to Music Radio award 1998 presenter, Classic FM 2005 inducted into Radio Academy Hall of Fame 2008 host, Counterpoint music quiz, Radio 4
  • (19) Worse still, it concluded, if Europe failed to surmount its economic crisis the prize would be a “risible memory, or worse, an epitaph for what Europe could have been, should have been.” 11.33am BST Aid donations My colleague Mark Tran, the Guardian's Global Development correspondent, has sent this as a counterpoint to the detractors: Something positive to say about the EU.
  • (20) The chancellor, George Osborne, coined the phrase two years ago, saying he wanted to join together the cities of the north as a counterpoint to the dominance of London and south-east England.

Melody


Definition:

  • (n.) A sweet or agreeable succession of sounds.
  • (n.) A rhythmical succession of single tones, ranging for the most part within a given key, and so related together as to form a musical whole, having the unity of what is technically called a musical thought, at once pleasing to the ear and characteristic in expression.
  • (n.) The air or tune of a musical piece.

Example Sentences:

  • (1) Moments later, Strauss introduces the bold human character with an energetic, upwards melody which he titles "the climb" in the score.
  • (2) There’s an interesting thing with music like this, how the beat falls with the melody; they often say music is mathematical in construction and this is a very good example.
  • (3) A psychophysical scaling procedure confirmed that the constraints generated tone sequences bearing degrees of perceptual similarity to "real" melodies.
  • (4) A model of how people use this information to infer the metre of unaccompanied melodies is described here.
  • (5) Young children also are sensitive to melodic contour over transformations that preserve it (Study 5), yet they distinguish spontaneously between melodies with the same contour and different intervals (Study 4).
  • (6) We also know little about the relative aptitude for different musical components, especially melody and harmony.
  • (7) He presented a right-ear extinction in dichotic tasks, as well as difficulties in understanding and repeating verbal material and impaired identification of melodies.
  • (8) But the album for which she is being rightly acclaimed, 50 Words for Snow, as well as cleverly weaving together some hauntingly beautiful melodies with a characteristically surrealist narrative, also perpetuates a widely held myth about the semantic capaciousness of the Inuit language.
  • (9) The fact that "different" responses were both faster than "same" ones and quicker than melody offset indicates the use of a self-terminating search process.
  • (10) Particular tones were shifted in sequence such that a melody was heard which was undetectable by either ear alone.
  • (11) Children 4 to 6 years of age were exposed to repetitions of a six-tone melody, then tested for their detection of transformations that either preserved or changed the contour of the standard melody.
  • (12) The key distance effect reported in the literature did not occur in the tasks of this investigation (Studies 1 and 3), and it may be apparent only for melodies shorter or more impoverished than those used here.
  • (13) All subjects had high DAF indices on the complex melody, middle on the medium and low on the simple.
  • (14) Other melody variables are either fixed, randomized, or controlled.
  • (15) Another one is Melodies From Mars, which I redid about three years ago.
  • (16) Melody processing in unilaterally brain-damaged patients was investigated by manipulating the availability of contour and metre for discrimination in melodies varying, respectively, on the pitch dimension and the temporal dimension.
  • (17) In the first experiment, two opposite hypotheses were tested: The slow shifts might express subjects' acquaintance with the melodies or, on the contrary, the effort invested to identify them.
  • (18) Melodic themes of target melodies were defined by correlating contour-related pitch accents with temporal accents (accent coupling) during an initial familiarization phase.
  • (19) The present findings indicate that interpretation of a melody depends, in large part, on the characteristics of the "tonal" rules.
  • (20) In Experiment 1, all to-be-recognized melodies occurred both in an original rhythm, which preserved accent coupling, and in a new rhythm, which did not.