Readers, remember when we told you about the crowdsourced melody happening over at CrowdSound.net? Users can put together a full melody by voting on each note, one at a time.

Now, the first crowdsourced song is complete, thanks to votes from over 65,000 people, and you can hear the whole thing right here.

CrowdSound users recently started voting on lyrics to go with their song, so head over and help choose the next word, before it gets too corny.

You can also write your own song; you can modify the song structure, choose how many votes to give each note in the melody, and you’ll get a generated URL to send to CrowdSound participants.

Listening to the voted-upon melody is a pretty fascinating exercise for anyone with an interest in music and in humans. It sounds like something you’ve definitely heard before (likely something by Coldplay), and the lyrics are just on the tip of your tongue. Already set were the basic chord progression and the verse-verse-chorus–verse-chorus-conclusion, and so users had basically the notes of a C-major scale to choose from (no sharps or flats).

With those parameters in place, perhaps it’s not surprising that the melody spends a lot of time in the pentatonic scale, one of the most global elements in music. The pentatonic (5-note) scale, compared to our familiar 7-note Western C-major scale, lacks the two notes in the major scale that hold tension: the F (fa) and B (ti).

It’s interesting that the crowd seemed to vote away from this kind of tension, favouring plenty of melodic repetition instead (another trait of popular songs). Perhaps it’s a complete accident, or perhaps it has something to do with people wanting their vote to “count,” not wanting to spend it on a “passing tone.”

Musing aside, CrowdSound has started a cool thing with their first melody. People have already started writing their own remixes of the tune, in case that lovely MIDI recording isn’t to your liking.

Head over to listen, vote, & crowdsource your next big hit.