Distorting familiar melodies by randomly assigning notes to different octaves makes recognition difficult. This difficulty can be lessened by preserving the contour (ups and downs) of the original melody. These experiments (using complex tones) show that cuing with either the unscrambled melody itself or its title also improves performance. In experiment 1 listeners heard a “straight” version of a familiar or an unfamiliar melody, followed by a scrambled version of either the same melody or a lure. Hit rates for scrambled melodies averaged 0.80, while false alarms to lures averaged 0.40. In experiment 2, scrambled familiar melodies or lures were preceded by accurate or spurious titles, respectively. Hit rates were 0.80 and false‐alarms 0.20. These results show that listeners can use a memorized, pitch‐and‐time‐flexible, “melody template” in recognizing scrambled melodies, just as they can in recognizing an unscrambled melody temporally interleaved with other tones in the same pitch range. The template is a list of relative tone “chromas,” which can be used in the recognition of scrambled melodies just as in the transposition of the familiar melodic intervals of the NBC chimes.