Studies of melodic contour have always discussed changes in pitch. The majority of these, including the most familiar (Friedmann 1985, Morris 1987, Marvin and Laprade 1987, Marvin 1988) and more recent (Clifford 2002, Bor 2006, Schultz 2009) mainly discuss non-diatonic post-tonal music. This study bucks both trends by focusing on melodic contour in diatonic contexts, and by discussing the effects that large leaps within diatonic collections have in modular space.

This presentation introduces the modular contour segment (mod cseg), a tool for modeling contour in diatonic modular space. It interprets sixths, sevenths, and compound intervals as octave displacements of smaller intervals. Its purpose is to place unwieldy melodic contours in a conceptual space that is as small as possible, and reveal how they relate to contour motives that sound in pitch space.

This presentation begins with a review of literature on melodic contour, recognizing contributions by those who do analyze diatonic music (Quinn 1997, Beard 2003). It then proceeds to the problem of contour and modular space, engaging directly with arguments in Morris (1987) that cast doubt on the plausibility of contour perception in modular spaces. This presentation discusses interacting pitch and modular contours in diatonic music from the eighteenth, nineteenth, and twentieth centuries. It also addresses perceptual studies whose conclusions either confirm or refute the idea of pitch-class equivalence in contour perception, including Deutsch (1972) and (1976), Deutsch et al. (1984), and Dowling (1978).