Craig Wright's Yale course Listening to Music turns in this lecture to melody, tracing how pitches and scales came to work the way they do. Wright moves from ancient Greek tuning systems through the medieval development of notation and the modern scale, then compares major, minor, and chromatic systems against scales used in Indian, Chinese, and American music, showing how different cultures carve up the octave differently. He closes by bringing pitch together with rhythm in a close look at Beethoven's Ninth Symphony, using it to demonstrate how melodic structure and rhythmic organization reinforce each other. The lecture is chaptered into four sections, running from the basic nature of melody through the historical development of notes and scales to the world music comparison and the Beethoven analysis. Recorded in Fall 2008 as part of Yale's Listening to Music course, it favors close listening and concrete musical examples over abstract theory.