What's the difference between melody and theme?

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.

Theme


Definition:

  • (n.) A subject or topic on which a person writes or speaks; a proposition for discussion or argument; a text.
  • (n.) Discourse on a certain subject.
  • (n.) A composition or essay required of a pupil.
  • (n.) A noun or verb, not modified by inflections; also, that part of a noun or verb which remains unchanged (except by euphonic variations) in declension or conjugation; stem.
  • (n.) That by means of which a thing is done; means; instrument.
  • (n.) The leading subject of a composition or a movement.

Example Sentences:

  • (1) A world conference in Edinburgh during August 1988 will have the theme.
  • (2) That, roughly, was the theme of the Wednesday Play, Cathy Come Home, (BBC1) directed by Kenneth Loach, produced by Tony Garnett.
  • (3) as well as nauseatingly hipster titbits – "They came up with the perfect theme (and coined a new term!
  • (4) Sometimes it can seem as if the history of the City is the history of its crises and disasters, from the banking crisis of 1825 (which saw undercapitalised banks collapse – perhaps the closest historic parallel to the contemporary credit crunch), through the Spanish panic of 1835, the railway bust of 1837, the crash of Overend Gurney, the Kaffir boom, the Westralian boom, the Marconi scandal, and so on and on – a theme with endless variations.
  • (5) By no means is this a new theme, but it has taken on an added sharpness and urgency after the conferences.
  • (6) An obsessional artist who was an enemy of all institutions, cinematic as well as social, and whose principal theme was intolerance, he invariably gets delivered to us today by institutions - most recently the National Film Theatre, which starts a Dreyer retrospective this month - that can't always be counted on to represent him in all his complexity.
  • (7) Read more Clinton spoke before more than a thousand supporters on Saturday at a launch event for “Women for Hillary” in New Hampshire, touching upon many of the familiar themes of her presidential campaign – equal pay for women, paid family leave, raising the minimum wage.
  • (8) The Christmas theme doesn't end there; "America's Christmas Hometown" also has Santa's Candy Castle, a red-brick building with turrets that was built by the Curtiss Candy Company in the 1930s and sells gourmet candy canes in abundance.
  • (9) Similar paradoxes bedevilled all the other chief themes.
  • (10) Synthesis and discussion is focused on five major areas in which gerontological continuity and change are evidenced: 1) transformation of basic themes over time; 2) gerontology's identity crisis; 3) the social ideology of gerontology; 4) evolution and refinement of gerontological ideas and methods; and 5) temporal frameworks.
  • (11) A key theme is expected to be that early intervention at every stage of life can prevent society having to continue "paying for the costs of failure".
  • (12) One constant theme is the wish for the Dalai Lama to return."
  • (13) The national anthems Nothing to say about the Indian anthem, but the New Zealand one sounds like the theme tune for an 1960s ATV variety spectacular.
  • (14) Ever since the ex-PD leader Walter Veltroni started praising President Kennedy as a way to jettison communism, this has been an abiding theme, manifesting itself institutionally in the desperate attempt to engineer a US-style two-party system through breathtakingly inept electoral reforms – the latest one, the " Porcellum " (after porcello, swine), was behind the impasse earlier this year.
  • (15) Ladybird: I’m Ready to Spell has a space theme, and is based on the phonics that kids will be learning in their first years at school.
  • (16) Bleak jokes and cartoons have been circulating for weeks in the anti-Assad camp on the theme of barrel bombs serving as ballot boxes.
  • (17) Redesigning the dream was identified as the integrative theme in the substantive theory that described how family members gradually modify their beliefs about organ transplantation and develop attitudes and beliefs to meet the challenge of living with continual unpredictability.
  • (18) Oil operators, large and small, are very keen to address the key themes of the waste hierarchy.
  • (19) And they kept coming … the hilarious Octodad: Dadliest Catch , the chilling psychological horror game Daylight , which again, uses procedural generation to create new environments (procedural content is another next-gen theme); and Galak-Z from 17bit Studios, described as an AI and physics-driven open-world action game.
  • (20) Cross-sectional as well as longitudinal comparisons indicated that the subjective sexual arousal elicited during fantasy depicting specific themes was stable across the menstrual cycle.