The Sioux Grass Dance song is an interesting song from the native Sioux Tribe of America.

The melody of the song is particularly interesting and noted to be something that European settlers had never heard anything like before. The contour of the song’s melody is a very stark and drastic one with many peaks and valleys in the pitch and volume. The song begins with the leader’s phrase in a piercing falsetto tone with an extremely high pitch. This is soon followed by other male voices joining in on the vocable phrases at a lower pitch. This repeats again, but female voices seem to join the male group at a slightly higher pitch. These phrases then continue on this cycle again three more times until the end of the recording. The character of the song has both conjunct and disjunct character at certain parts. The character is conjunct during the phrases with the leader and male group voices together at a lower pitch. The character becomes disjunct in the parts between the female voices are ending their slightly higher pitched phrase but it slides in the leader’s high pitched falsetto part, showing two distinctive pitches. The range of the song, because of the high pitch of the leader’s phrase and the lower range of the other group of males’ phrase is pretty large. There are very high and very low notes in the piece and the space between the two types of notes is vast. The phrasing of the song is about fourteen separate phrases. The listener can tell the beginning and ending of each phrase because at the beginning of each new phrase of melody, a new melodic part comes in and either the pitch of the phrase drops or raises, or a new group comes in (the leader, the males, the females). This can be when the leader begins his high-pitched vocables in falsetto, it can be when the male group voices repeat the leader’s phrase, when they (the leader and the group together) drop to a lower pitch, or when the female voices come in at a higher pitch than the male voices. The melodic motives of the song are the building blocks of the entire piece. The motive being the “leader-male voices-leader/male voices-female voices” melodic segment that cycles throughout the recording. There is no melodic part that interrupts or divides up that combination of melodic parts and that section is repeated about four times from start to finish.