# How to identify a piece of music ?



## Robin Clay (Feb 25, 2017)

"We" have a system of indexing words - we call it "alphabetical order", which is (as far as I know) an entirely arbitrary arrangement of letters.

The Chinese have many different spoken language, but only one written language, which uses "pictographs" made up from a number of brush strokes. So how do they index things like a telephone directory ? Well, they use the number of brush strokes required to create a character, and the indexing sequence is this number in ascending order.

But what about music ?

I heard a while ago, that one can identify / index a piece of music simply by the sequence of successive notes, whether the next note is higher (+), the same (=) or lower (-).

Here's an example - I wonder if you can identify it ? The first note is #; it's a song.

#=+-++ +=+-=+ +--+

IF this works, then perhaps it could be used in this Forum ?


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## hustlefan (Apr 29, 2016)

Search by melodic contour is available at http://www.musipedia.org/melodic_contour.html


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## Robin Clay (Feb 25, 2017)

hustlefan said:


> Search by melodic contour is available at http://www.musipedia.org/melodic_contour.html


Thank you ! I've never heard that term. I must give it a whirl ;-)


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