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This paper relates and develops some aspects of the authors' book on melody. 1. Listeners commonly speak of 'melodic music', 'good examples' of it, and 'non-melodic' music. These distinctions are correlated on one side to a given experience centred on the 'cantabile' (singable), on the other to an open set of given musical features. 2. In this sense 'melody' appears as a prototype, i.e. a semantic category opposed to the concept of necessary and sufficient traits. Its main features are centrality and family resemblances between members. 3. The above concepts are applied to 'family airs'; all melodies showing a family likeness have some traits of the same prototypical scheme. 4. In the terms of Eco's theory of sign production, prototype refers to recognition and to replica. As for the invention of the model, this does not proceed by a simple expression/content correlation, but by an assemblage of correlations already present. KEY WORDS Melody, family resemblance, prototype, sign production.